


honour for all

by estora



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:14:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 84,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26661286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/estora/pseuds/estora
Summary: The Empresswasdifferent. Good assassins aren't supposed to feel and they aren't supposed to regret, but there was Daud, feeling things and regretting everything.A story of redemption, love, anger and revenge. Repost of my 'honour for all' series.
Relationships: Corvo Attano/Daud, Emily Kaldwin/Alexi Mayhew
Comments: 13
Kudos: 77





	1. with blood on our hands

**Author's Note:**

> I originally wrote and posted this series in 2017, but pulled them down when I moved into original fiction. Recently, however, there was an attempt made to re-upload these fics to AO3 without my knowledge or permission. To prevent this from happening in the future, I have decided to upload them again myself. Obviously I didn't want to have to do this, but I would rather have edited/restricted versions of these stories up and under my control instead of fearing that someone else might take it upon themselves to upload what doesn't belong to them.
> 
> Obviously it's inappropriate for anyone to ever repost fics that have been taken down by another author without their permission. Of this series, there were originally 6 stories - I have edited them, and decided to only post 4. If you are a former fan and you'd read the series years ago, and you still have the PDFs/other formats of all of the stories in their unedited forms, I am happy for those to be enjoyed _in private_. None of my stories are to **ever** be uploaded to AO3, FFN, Wattpad, or any other site, again. No one has my permission to repost or publicly share my stories.
> 
> With that out of the way, I hope that those in the past who remember these stories will be pleased to see them (albeit edited) back online; to new readers, welcome, and I hope you enjoy the stories. Please keep in mind that these were written in 2017 and do not reflect the quality of my writing today.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Empress _was_ different. Good assassins aren't supposed to feel and they aren't supposed to regret, but here he is, feeling things and regretting everything. The road of redemption has never been an easy one to walk.

**with blood on our hands**

His mother always said he had the steadiest hands in Serkonos.

The mixing of poisons and hallucinogens was a delicate art. One mistake – one clumsy knock of a glass vial – and the best-case scenario would be that you’d hallucinate vividly and drool on the ground for a few hours. Their small house always smelled vaguely noxious, like bitter flowers and mint rotting in a bed of sulphur, but it was a scent Daud preferred to the chalky dust of the streets where he wasted far too much time showing off to people he didn’t consider friends.

“Hold this,” his mother would instruct while she brewed her poisons like an artist perfecting a masterpiece portrait. He would obey, hold the beaker with deadly toxin innocently simmering behind the glass only a few millimetres from his hand, and wait until she asked him to pass it over or to pour it into the concoction she worked on.

Even at the age of twelve his hands were strong and calloused from his work in the mines when money grew tight, though despite this his touch was strangely delicate, from the way he could balance beakers of poisons that could kill a human within seconds to the way he was easily the best shot in the district, able to take out a line of bottles from two hundred yards away with a small crossbow he had stolen from the hungover City Watch guards lazily patrolling the streets.

Daud had other talents besides winning the Steadiest Hands in Serkonos Award, not that such a thing existed to the best of his knowledge. During games of hide-and-seek with the other children in the district he would always be the last to be found, if he was found at all, or he could spot every person hiding within several minutes.

Naturally, he was frequently accused of cheating. “Son of a witch!” was the popular taunt. “Outsider’s Bastard!” was another.

His mother, while born in the wild lands of Pandyssia and had a peculiar foreign look to her, was not a witch and she was not touched by the Outsider, but the reputation suited him just fine. After all, surely only someone who dealt in heretical artefacts and worship could possess such steady hands.

It was only a matter of time before the Overseers eventually paid their small home on the corner of Batista a visit, he now realises, decades after the fact with the hindsight and wisdom that only age and experience can bestow upon a person. Fourteen-year-old boys are exceedingly stupid and he was no exception; the local rumours of a boy who could vanish without a trace, born of a Pandyssian witch, did not stay local when one too many people fell on the wrong end of his mother’s liberally-applied poisons.

Daud was no stranger to death. People died in the silver mines when equipment malfunctioned and got their limbs ripped off, bleeding out faster than the wound could be cauterised, and plenty more died on the streets where he grew up. Emaciated dogs rotting in the gutters, being gnawed at by rats; the unfortunate orphan child just trying to spend a night under a roof of an abandoned home, only to succumb to a thousand stings from a bloodfly nest in the very corner they thought had been their salvation from the rain.

But there’s always something different when it happens closer to home.

He was fourteen years old and there was no question and even less room for denial that his mother was dead. There was too much blood and she was too still, her nose shattered and her ribs caved in.

She’d put up a good fight. Five Overseers had paid their house that smelled of bitter flowers and mint a visit that night; only one remained standing when Daud finally arrived home after a long day in the mines. The Overseer’s mask had been ripped off and his face beneath it was half-charred, boiled away from where his mother – in a final act of defiance – had smashed a bottle of acid across his ugly mug.

“You should be glad, kid,” the Overseer had said, a sneer upon his ruined face. “Your mother was a heretic, and heathens like her are better dead than they are alive.”

The blind fury came first. He snarled and lunged at the last Overseer standing, tackling him to the ground in a swift leap to wrap his hands around the murderer’s throat. He squeezed and squeezed and squeezed with hands as strong and as still as marble, hands that were too strong and calloused for a boy his age, until the Overseer stopped gurgling and thrashing and clawing at Daud’s face and finally stilled.

Daud had pulled back, his clawed face stinging and his breaths coming in hard, rasping gasps, and stared at the corpse. It was over, he remembers he tried to tell himself, it was over, the Overseer was dead, he’d avenged his mother –

But it wasn’t enough.

There was a glass bottle on the table, filled not with a deadly toxin but rather his mother’s favourite Cullero-cultivated wine, a gift from a grateful patron which she would never again have the chance to taste. He smashed it down onto the Overseer’s head and chest, crushing the man’s nose with the first blow and shredding his acid-boiled face with the rest. Sharp glass ripped through the murderer’s skin until the face was nothing but a bloodied, mutilated mess.

He’d staggered away and vomited, then stared at his hands. Bloodied and bruised and aching with bits of glass puncturing the calloused skin – and as still as a frozen lake.

There are whole novels dedicated to romanticising the idea of an assassin – what they do, what their codes of honour are, how they learn how to kill, how they feel about it – but in Daud’s experience only two things matter if one wants to be an assassin: you must not feel, and you must not regret.

He did not feel when he was kidnapped off the streets of what is now known as the Dust District; he did not regret his two years of service under the man who forced him to kill and steal indiscriminately. He did not feel when he turned the man’s own whaling blade against him and shoved it through his chest; he did not regret getting on a ship to Dunwall at the age of sixteen and never looking back at the place he once called home.

He broke his own rule only once – when the Outsider appeared to him and called him _fascinating_ and bestowed a mark upon the back of a hand that has never wavered once in forty-two years.

One more job, this job, shouldn’t matter. He’s killed nobles before. You could float a whaling ship on the high-born blood he’s spilled. Another noble steps in to replace the last one, all equally corrupt. It’s a never-ending cycle. One over there wants this one dead for reasons Daud doesn’t especially care for so long as the money gets paid and trouble isn’t caused for him and his Whalers. Another noble over there wants that one dead for different reasons, but the money gets paid and the job gets done, and another comes to take their place so the contracts never run dry and the money keeps flowing.

All nobles are the same. They bleed red like any other creature and they die gracelessly. Sometimes they defecate themselves when they die. Others cry and beg for mercy when his steady blade slides through their flesh. A good assassin doesn’t feel, and a good assassin doesn’t regret.

Why should an Empress be any different?

“Sir?”

Billie’s voice, muffled ever so slightly by the mask, draws him out of his reverie.

“What,” he grunts, staring at the back of his hands.

“Is everything all right?”

Daud clenches his fists together. “Shut the girl up,” he snaps, jerking his leather gloves, stiffened with drying royal blood, back over his hands as Lady Emily, daughter of the Empress, screams for her mother.

He cannot see Billie’s expression through her mask. Her posture is tense so he imagines she must be frowning, but she nods nonetheless, a terse movement of her head in acknowledgement before transversing away in a blink. A few moments later the girl’s voice quietens.

He looks back down at his hands, and no matter how much he wills them to steady, they do not stop trembling.

* * *

**but we will not run**

_I give my Mark sparingly, Daud_ , the black-eyed bastard had said, unusually earnest. _I’ve seen it used for power, for love, for money. For strange obsessions that drove the wearer mad. But very, very rarely, for redemption_.

This doesn’t feel like redemption.

“You… _didn’t_ kill her? Sir?”

Thomas’s voice isn’t laced with the same dubiousness that plagued the undercurrents of Billie’s words these last six months. He’s just curious, and a little confused, and caught somewhere between concern and fascination. Most of the men are.

“Better this way,” Daud replies gruffly, and leaves it at that because it’s easier to maintain the façade of pretending he knows what he’s doing instead of admitting that his heart pounds of out time and his breath catches in his throat and his fingers tremble when he grips the hilt of the blade that stilled the Empress’s heart.

“I’ll ask Stride to get the _Undine_ ready then,” Thomas wages, and Daud only nods in response.

If anyone deserved death, it was Delilah, though if the last six months have taught him anything, it is to be wary of words like ‘deserve’ when he more than anyone in this dying world surely deserves his inevitable fate. Not that the Outsider has ever spelled out word for word that Corvo Attano is coming for him – he’s a bastard like that, wrapping everything he means to say up in double-talk and wry poetry and the occasional dismissive personal jab at Daud’s mere existence.

 _Don’t worry, you black-eyed bastard_ , Daud thinks. _It’ll be over soon._

He should consider it an honour to die at the hands of a man like the former Royal Protector. Attano was born on the 25th day of the Month of Nets in 1798 into a lower-class family in Karnaca, only several districts away from where Daud grew up. When Daud was sixteen, he murdered his kidnapper and got on a ship to Dunwall, never to look back; when Attano was sixteen, he won the Blade Verbena and came to the attention of Duke Theodanis Abele, who two years later sent him to Dunwall to serve the Emperor and became the first Royal Protector to be born outside of Gristol.

By all accounts, Corvo Attano is a remarkable man.

Given that there are only three years between their ages and they arrived in Dunwall within in a year of each other, Daud often finds his mind straying back to those days in Serkonos to scour for some scrap of memory that would validate his horrified suspicion that he knew the Royal Protector on the dusty windswept streets of Batista, but his attempts never get any further than remembering those brown eyes as Attano was dragged away from the Empress’s body.

Dead eyes, he’d thought six months ago. Dead eyes belonging to a dead man, accused and imprisoned for a crime he did not commit because it suited certain political parties with deep pockets to do so. Dead brown eyes that have been seared into Daud’s memory as though someone has taken a brand to his mind. That vacant, stunned look, as though he was trapped in a dream while Thomas tethered him out of reach of the Empress, and that cry of despair wrenched from his throat the moment Daud’s sword slid through Jessamine Kaldwin’s stomach that wakes Daud up every single morning since that day, cold sweat on his brow and gasping for air.

If there was any doubt that Attano was the Empress’s lover and Emily’s father, it was assuaged that day on the gazebo. Attano wasn’t supposed to be there; Burrow’s information was wrong. He wasn’t supposed to witness as Daud shoved his blade through Jessamine Kaldwin’s body – no man should be condemned to helplessly watch on as his family is ripped apart before his very eyes.

Daud knows better than most what a person is capable of doing when someone they love is murdered, but how many loved ones has he murdered? It’s strange to think of himself as _naïve_ ; naivety is something he’s always mentally reserved for youth or sheltered beings, people who haven’t experienced the brutal awakening of realising the world is a foul, unkind place. There’s surely some naivety in thinking he could avoid the consequences of his actions forever – thinking he could just freeze time and transverse away from the problem, get paid and never look back over his shoulder to see the faces of the collateral victims of his crimes.

 _You could run_ , he thinks. Emily Kaldwin, wherever she is at the moment – whoever’s pawn she is now that the Lord Regent’s regime has crumbled down around him like the rotting buildings eroding in the stagnant waters of the Flooded District – is safe for now, free from a life of fear and living death at Delilah’s hands. The Outsider, for whatever his opinion is worth, seems to consider Daud redeemed, but not enough to escape his fate. The worst thing about waiting for the end is – well, it’s the waiting. The hours dripping by like a leak in a roof, drop after relentless drop.

He could run, but it won’t change his fate. His story is close to ending – the only thing he can choose is how it ends. Like a coward, fleeing the consequences of his crimes, or like a man, ready to face the end in whatever form it comes, probably at the end of Corvo Attano’s sword.

There are worse ways to die than at the end of a blade belonging to a man of honour. Or at the end of a blade belonging to a man out for revenge, he supposes. Either is an equally suitable way to die, and it's not like he'll be around afterwards to complain about the execution.

The _Undine_ drops him and his Whalers off as close to the Flooded District as Lizzie Stride dares. He shakes her hand and he appreciates the way she says nothing about the tremors she can no doubt feel under her strong grip. He doesn’t answer the unspoken question rippling through his men – _What now?_ – and curtly orders Thomas to give him some privacy.

Being an assassin means being able to pack up your things and get out of wherever you’ve holed up at a moment’s notice, and leave no evidence of your existence behind. The moment Billie sold them out and the Overseers descended on the Flooded District and encroached upon his base was the moment he should have ordered his Whalers to pack up and move out, but here he is, one week later, and he hasn’t moved a single item. It’s not homely – it’s a half-crumbled, waterlogged building with half a roof – but the corner of the room that still has a ceiling shelters yellowed and fraying maps he’s carried with him for decades, history and fiction books that he’s received as gifts from his Whalers. There’s a desk, a lamp, an audiograph, piles of paper heaped on the floor and a chest shoved deep under the bed under lock and key. A pithy hiding place, but then he wasn’t really trying to hide it.

Billie was right. Despite all of the blood on his hands, he has been stashing coin for some kind of plan. Some kind of hope for a new life.

Well. It won’t be the first unrealised dream of his to crumble in this decaying world.

 _Ports of Call_ has been left face-down on the desk. He trails his fingers over the hard cover, resisting the urge to open it, because if he does he’ll read it and then he’ll start getting _ideas_ and then he’ll imagine a scenario where he lives beyond the next few days, and really, what’s worse than knowing you’re going to die and still praying for a new life?

“Sorry, Billie,” he murmurs. “But I don’t think I’m going to get that chance.”

He pushes the book aside, fits his audiograph with a card, and clicks it on.

“No one will ever know exactly what it took to save Emily Kaldwin from a living death as Delilah’s puppet,” he says, the static hum of the audiorecording filling the air. “No one except the Outsider, who watches everything and thinks his own dark thoughts and speaks to few in any generation. I’ve learned that our choices always matter to someone, somewhere.”

He clenches his trembling hands.

“And sooner or later, in ways we can’t always fathom, the consequences come back to us. I came from Serkonos to Dunwall as a boy, made my living as a killer, one of the few who’ve heard the Outsider’s voice. I murdered an Empress but saved her daughter, who will one day rule the Empire. Those were my choices.”

 _Your story is close to ending, and even you can’t escape it_ , the Outsider had said, his head tilted to one side, black eyes narrowed and ever curious, ever taunting. _But what ending will you make for yourself?_

A better one than the one he deserves, he hopes. But given the Masked Felon’s penchant for dishing out fates of true dramatic irony, the odds are not in his favour. What will Corvo consider a fitting punishment for the knife that killed the Empress?

Whatever it will be, he takes comfort in the fact that it will be thematically appropriate. Not a lot of comfort. But some.

Maybe his men will get a chuckle out of it.

He unclenches his fists, the light tremors of his hands skimming across the wood of his desk, and exhales, a slow and steady breath.

“I’m ready for what comes.”

One heartbeat. Two heartbeats. He clicks the audiograph off and removes the card from the machine, and when he looks up Thomas is waiting.

“Thomas,” Daud greets.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, sir.”

Daud waves the apology off. “What is it.”

Thomas hesitates. “It’s… Attano.”

 _I’m ready for what comes_ , he thinks, even as his blood runs as cold as a Tyvian winter. “What of him?” Daud asks, voice hoarse.

“He’s here.”

Instinct takes over; his hand jumps down to his waist where his sword is sheathed, but no sooner than his fingers brush the hilt cold sweat breaks out on his forehead and his heart starts pounding and he feels like the Overseer he strangled to death twenty-eight years ago.

“Where,” he manages to say.

“Well, that’s the thing,” Thomas says. “He’s drifting down the flooded streets in a boat.”

* * *

Attano is in a bad shape.

The man rowed into their base isn’t the man he’d seen on the gazebo six months ago. That man wasted away in Coldridge Prison, probably sustained only by stale bread and foul-tasting water leaking from the ceiling. His hair has grown out and his face is gaunt and skeletal, dark shadows hanging under his dead eyes and body far too thin. He smells vaguely of bile, sewerage and a bitter scent that makes him feel ten years old again, being taught how to identify and handle a vial of deadly Tyvian toxin by his mother.

And on the back of his left hand, a mark that mirrors Daud’s own hand.

 _You fucking bastard_ , Daud thinks, staring at it until Rinaldo clears his throat.

“What’s wrong with him?” Daud asks, though he already knows.

“Poisoned. Tyvian, so far as I can tell. It was poorly done but the man is an emaciated wreck. He’ll be in a lot of pain, though he should live so long as he rests and gets proper medical treatment as soon as possible.” Rinaldo pauses, then continues haltingly, “Assuming you… _want_ him to live, of course.”

Daud nods. “Do you what you can for him, then we’ll leave him in the holding area.”

Rinaldo works efficiently, with the grace and dignity of a seasoned physician from the Academy of Natural Philosophy. Maybe Daud will split his savings between his Whalers – Rinaldo and the others, unlike him, still have the chance to make new lives for themselves. Follow the callings they were meant for before Daud put blades in their hands and masks over their faces.

Rinaldo begins by removing Attano’s clothes to check for injuries, folding them and setting them aside the nightmare-inducing mask on the stand beside the makeshift bed where injured Whalers are treated for their wounds. Thomas had been on this very bed six months ago, after Attano shot him in the side.

“What the –” Rinaldo murmurs, rifling through Attano’s seemingly endless pockets and removing more coin purses and trinkets and loose crossbow bolts than Daud has ever seen in his life on a single man. “By the Void. It’s like he’s looted half of Dunwall.”

“That explains the recent economic downturn,” Daud says.

“Not the plague, sir?” Rinaldo asks once he’s done and all of Attano’s belongings have been transferred to the chest, now containing his weapons and a troublingly large collection of bone charms and noble pendants. He pressing his fingers against various glands on Attano’s neck, armpits and inner thighs to check the swelling and progress of the poison through his system. “Or the floods?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. When have things like disease and natural disaster ever made more of an impact on a society than a compulsive pick-pocketer?”

Rinaldo stares, then starts to laugh. “I think that’s the first joke I’ve heard you crack in months, Daud.”

How tragic. “Let me know when he’s in the clear,” Daud says, and casts a curious, cursory glance over Attano before transversing away.

It’s a day later by the time Attano is lucid enough to haul to his feet and clap in iron, preventing him from tapping into the power of the Void and escaping their grasp.

The men think Daud intends to turn Attano over to the new Lord Regent for a 30,000 coin reward, and it’s tempting. That much coin would be enough to start a new life ten times over, and the Whalers wouldn’t have to work again the way they have been for the next decade.

He doesn’t like lying, so he doesn’t – he just doesn’t disabuse them of the idea.

“I know a great deal, bodyguard,” Daud says, the chest containing half of Dunwall’s loose change and Attano’s weapons under his arm. Attano doesn’t struggle, or cry out, or swear, or even say a single word. He just watches Daud with those haunted dead eyes. “I recognise those marks on your hand. A gift from your friend, the one who talks to you in the dark. Talks to you when you visit his shrines. I’ve visited those shrines too.”

He removes the folding blade from the chest and examining it idly, and he hopes Attano is still too addled to notice the way the sword trembles in his grasp.

“And I know what it felt like to shove a blade into your Empress.”

There. _That_ forces a reaction from the silent Royal Protector. His dead eyes burn, a hatred simmering just below the surface. Daud returns the blade to the chest, locks it – and tosses it down to the bottom of the refinery.

Daud has seen this expression on Attano the only other time their paths crossed, six months ago. A particular sort of agony, as though whatever is left of his still-beating heart shatters in his chest.

 _Good_ , he thinks. _Take that pain, and do with it as you will._

“But I don’t know you, who you are, and who you fight for,” Daud continues. “You’re a mystery, and I can’t allow that.”

He gestures and Rulfio nods, then jabs Attano in the neck with a sleep dart. Attano grunts softly – perhaps even tries to speak – but unconsciousness takes him quickly. He is removed from his cuffs and taken away by Aedan and Kieron, and Daud releases the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding the moment Attano is out of sight.

Rulfio stays with him as they make their way back to the base, transversing across the patrolled outlooks.

“Shall I stay, sir?” he asks once they’ve arrived back at Daud’s quarters.

“No,” Daud says. “I have some work to finish up. You can leave.”

Rulfio doesn’t move at all.

“Was there something else, Rulfio?” he asks.

“You know,” Rulfio snaps, “sometimes I have no idea how you can believe your own bullshit.”

That was… unexpected from his usually mild apprentice. “Excuse me?” Daud says, eyebrows raised.

“You heard what I said!” he hisses. “You think I don’t know? You think we’re all _blind_? You haven’t used your sword once since the hit on the Empress and you can’t even load your wristbow with hardbolts without having a panic attack! You don’t plan on passing Attano off to the City Watch for the reward, you were _goading_ him! And those wooden slats aren’t going to hold him. He’s Marked, like you are. Rinaldo said you weren’t yourself but I didn’t think he meant you were actively seeking to _die!_ ”

Daud folds his arms across his chest. “Are you finished?”

“Is that all you have to say?” Rulfio exclaims.

It’s all he can verbalise, but that’s not quite the same thing. “When Attano comes for me,” Daud says, “you will not intervene.”

“You’re not even trying to deny what I said!”

“You will _not intervene._ Is that understood?”

“Sir –”

“I _said_ ,” he repeats, slamming his hands down upon the desk, “ _is that understood?_ ”

Rulfio stills, and when he speaks again his voice is quiet. “Yes, sir,” he whispers.

“Go.”

Rulfio doesn’t obey. “Sir…” he says quietly. “Please don’t die. I know you might think you want to –”

“What part of _go_ did you have trouble comprehending, Rulfio?”

“– and believe me, I know, I _know_ what it’s like to feel that way, but –”

“ _Enough_.”

“– but there’s always something left worth living for. You taught me that. You helped me _believe_ it.”

“You’re dismissed, Rulfio.”

Rulfio stares at him, long and hard, then finally swivels where he stands and vanishes, transversing away and leaving only his anger behind like one of his mother’s shattered vials of poison, filling the room with noxious gas.

* * *

“So you've lost it all. Ruined at last, Lord Regent. Royal Spymaster. Hiram Burrows. You small, worried man. You'll never know how many times I've thought about trying to get close to you again, just to put a piece of sharp metal in your eye.”

The audiograph crackles and hisses, as though it knows its purpose is to record the last words he may ever speak.

“But now there's no need. You've been taken down by the same apparatus that gave you life to begin with: laws and courtrooms and the mighty swell of public outrage.” Daud smothers a bitter laugh. “Good riddance to you, sir. So many schemes you had and so many contracts. How many people did I kill for you? None like the last. None like her. I'd give back all the coin if I could.”

Void knows he’s not going to need it where he’s going.

“No one should have to kill an Empress.”

He ends the recording, one resigned press of a button that cuts the static buzz and fills the room with nothing but the sound of his own, shallow breathing.

When he looks up, Corvo Attano, masked and armed to the teeth, stands before him, his sword drawn and watching him in silence. Waiting.

Daud breathes, and endures the now-familiar surge of dread when his hand closes over the hilt of his own sword to unsheathe it. The last time his sword drew blood was six months ago on a gazebo, before an innocent little girl’s eyes and a man rendered helpless by the unfair advantage of black magic.

He just hopes his shaking hands can hold his sword long enough, buy enough time, to make his final plea.

_I’m ready for what comes._

* * *

**the air in our chests**

They fight the duel that no other two people could fight, though Daud wonders if he should have at least tried to prepare in other ways than just mentally, given that he’s six months out of practice and Corvo Attano is one of the Isles’ most legendary swordsmen.

Attano moves with a grace and a beauty Daud has rarely seen in his life. It’s not that Daud himself has a poor form. He is – or _was_ – as ruthless in his application of his sword as his mother was merciless with her poisons, but there is no artform to his technique, only the ability to throw his weight behind each blow, his endurance and speed, and the vision the Void provides him that allows him to anticipate where Attano’s elegant whirlwind of a death dance will strike him next.

He can’t help it – he taunts Attano. About Coldridge; Attano’s blade clips his leg. About the Empress; Attano cuts him across the chest. About how they’re just the same when that isn’t true at all because the Masked Felon didn’t leave a single body in his wake while he terrorised the city at night, but Daud thinks he might be the bodyguard’s one and only exception. Attano’s blade strikes him in the side and sends him transversing in limping staggers across the ruins of the adjacent building.

He freezes time to stop his men from coming to his aid. He transverses further and further away from Attano to catch his breath, until he’s out of elixir and backed up into a corner. And he defends his opponent’s furious blows until the sword that killed an Empress and brought Dunwall to its knees is smashed away out of his grasp, flying over the side and landing in the stagnant waters with a pathetic splash, or perhaps he drops it because his hand is shaking harder than it ever has, and he’s ready for this to be over.

No thematically-appropriate or ironic punishment for him, Daud thinks, as Attano grabs a fistful of Daud’s jacket and hauls him to his knees before him, pressing the deadly edge of his folding blade across his throat. Just a simple, quick death – the end of his rope, the debt he owes to Attano and that little girl and all of Dunwall finally repaid as he stares into the shielded eyes of the man he wronged.

He hopes the Outsider, at least, is entertained.

He’s ready. He’s ready. He’s ready.

Except on his left he can see his office through the crumbling walls of this dead corner of a dying city and he can see that fucking book Billie left him, face down on the desk and shoved aside so he wouldn’t think about it but now he is, he _is_ thinking about it and the pages he thumbed during the nights he couldn’t sleep, mind racing and hand shaking and heart aching at Billie’s betrayal. Thinking about the way he read and reread the section on Cullero and the warm days in the sun away from all of this death and destruction and pain and misery caused by his own hand and he’s _not fucking ready._

There’s always something worth living for. Even if he doesn’t deserve it.

“I have… one more surprise for you,” Daud rasps, his throat moving against the cold sword digging against his Adam’s apple. “I ask for my life.”

The Outsider considers Daud’s neutralisation of Delilah, her threat to the girl whose life he ruined and whose innocence he ripped away, an act of redemption, as though saving Emily Kaldwin somehow clears the slate. It doesn’t, because it was the bare minimum, the _least_ he owed and his debt to that girl will never be repaid so long as he shall live, be it five seconds or five decades more, and he has no right to bring it up as if trading one act for another will balance the scales of morality.

Attano doesn’t say a word. Daud can hear his ragged breathing from behind the mask. Unhealthy breathing, as though his lungs are filling with water, a side effect sometimes from being poisoned and lethal if left untreated.

But he also doesn’t slash his blade the rest of the way across Daud’s throat, so Daud takes it as permission to continue.

“When I killed your Empress and took her daughter, something broke inside me,” Daud says, the words spilling out of him. “Now I see the design on the back of your hand, the Mark of the Outsider himself, and I remember all I’ve done. The years of waiting for the right moment to step forward from an alley and drive a knife between the ribs of some noble. All the money exchanging hands, from one rich bastard or another. Killing for one of them one year, then being paid to kill him in return the next.”

And how proud of it he was, too. The Knife of Dunwall. The nobles’ assassin. He’d been fourteen years old and newly orphaned, with blood on his hands and no other option than to obey his kidnapper and kill on command, but he’d never truly escaped, had he? Even after killing the man who snatched him off the streets and put a blade in his hand, he’d just kept on killing, then eventually found other orphans and abused children with no other options and convinced them that there was something to be prideful of in this line of work, that he’s somehow deserving of their love and loyalty.

And now he’s just so very _tired._

“Now I want nothing but to leave this city, and fade from the memory of those who reside here.” Attano presses the blade harder against Daud’s throat, and he feels the skin there sting and split, just a little. He catches his breath – the last breath he may ever take, and whispers, “I’ve had enough killing. So my life is in your hands.”

One heartbeat.

Two heartbeats.

Three heartbeats.

The blade falls away, and Daud slumps to the ground, coughing hard, and clutches his throat expecting to find a gaping wound and a rush of blood, expecting to gurgle and die as Attano tosses him down a hole where he can bleed out alongside his sunken sword, an undignified end to a man without honour.

But instead he feels only a small cut, barely splitting the skin, and a light trickle of blood dripping across his leather gloves.

_I’m alive._

His eyes burn. “And you choose mercy,” he whispers, mind blank and his words numb. “Extraordinary.”

Attano watches him through that hideous mask, silent because no words need to be said, and folds his sword and turns. Daud pushes himself to his feet, intending to transverse away to anywhere that _isn’t here_ and leave and never come back – but Attano takes three steps away before he staggers, then collapses in a heap atop the rubble and filth.

Daud stares. “…Shall we call it a draw, then?”

Attano doesn’t reply, but then, Daud doesn’t really expect him to.

* * *

He limps back to the base with Corvo Attano slung over his right shoulder, transversing across to his office where Thomas is picking himself up off the ground, rubbing his neck and coughing.

“Sir, I don’t know what happened,” Thomas rasps. “I didn’t even hear him or see him sneak up on me, I’m sorry –”

“It’s fine,” Daud grunts, easing Attano’s figure on to his bed, and latches his trembling fingers around the mask to ease it off, setting is aside gently on the table. “Find Rinaldo and bring him here, please.”

Thomas stares at the unconscious former bodyguard on Daud’s bed. “Didn’t he just try to _kill_ you?”

“Yes,” Daud says, “but what I can say, I took his breath away.”

There’s a beat. “Sir?”

“Quite literally. His lungs are filling with fluid – uncommon but not unheard of side-effect of the toxin.” Daud looks at Thomas pointedly. “He needs medical attention, urgently. Rinaldo. Go.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll find out if there have been any… casualties.”

There won’t be. But Daud nods, and Thomas transverses away.

Attano didn’t look all that great when he first arrived here, but he looks even worse now. The concept of ‘fairness’ isn’t one that Daud ascribes to – nothing is _fair_ in this world. But there’s a certain bitterness he tastes at the back of his throat as he stares down at Corvo Attano’s pale and gaunt features. It wasn’t enough for Daud to murder the woman he loved and to turn his daughter over to the usurpers for money, and it wasn’t enough that Attano was accused of the crime, and it wasn’t enough for this sick fucking world to make him endure six months of torture in Coldridge. He had to be betrayed and poisoned and left for dead, too.

And after all that, he _still_ stayed his hand.

_Extraordinary._

So no, it’s not fucking fair that after everything, Attano might die anyway. His once-handsome face is damp with cold sweat and his brow shivering, and the rattling in his chest as he tries to draw air into lungs steadily filling with fluid, drowning him on dry(ish) land. Daud grimaces and shifts Attano’s body into a more comfortable position, waiting for Thomas to return with Rinaldo.

“What a strange man you are,” Daud murmurs. An odd feeling washes over him and congeals in his chest, but before he can identify it, Rinaldo transverses into the room, carrying with him his medical supplies.

“I’m pretty sure I did this just the other day,” Rinaldo says, setting up beside the bed. “You haven’t added time travel to your list of abilities, have you?”

If he had, Daud thinks, he’d have used that power six months ago. Instead of answering, he steps back to allow Rinaldo space and greets Thomas when he returns.

“No casualties,” Thomas informs him. “Just a lot of sore necks and wounded prides. And I… took the liberty of recovering your sword, Daud.”

Daud restrains his instinct to flinch, settling instead for a curt nod. “Leave it on my desk,” he orders, and Thomas nods, then tilts his head and peers closer at Daud.

“Your neck,” he says. “You’re bleeding.”

He steps back, shaking his head. “It’s fine.”

Thomas assesses him again, and although Daud cannot see his eyes through the mask he thinks Thomas glances at his chest, his side, his leg, and the blood oozing from the wounds. “You’re bleeding _all over_. I’ll ask Rinaldo to –”

“Rinaldo is busy with Attano.”

“At least let Jenkins look you over.”

“It’s nothing that disgusting concoction Sokolov came up with can’t fix,” Daud says, and pushes past Thomas to stand beside Rinaldo as he works.

“How is he?”

“Took a turn for the worse, but you already worked that out. Probably didn’t help that he decided to pick a fight with you and exerted himself too quickly when he was only barely recovered. He’s lucky he didn’t leave the Flooded District. Can you imagine if he’d collapsed somewhere in the sewers?” Rinaldo shakes his head, disgusted. “There’s only so much I can do for him here, though. I’m not a real physician, you know. If I can stabilise him he should recover. Or hang on long enough for Sokolov to check him out, I guess. He kidnapped Sokolov, didn’t he? He’s gotta know where the old man is.”

“We’re not kidnapping Sokolov.”

“But think of how _useful_ it’ll be to have him here. The Royal Physician himself!”

“If you want Sokolov’s signature that badly, I’m happy to forge it for you.”

Rinaldo grumbles something to himself about it ‘not being the same’ and keeps working on Attano.

“Where the hell does he even find this stuff,” Rinaldo mutters, shedding Attano of his inner gear and about ten bone charms, several rolls of copper wiring and medicinal herbs that weren’t there last time. His hand closes around something else in Attano’s inside jacket pocket that makes him start. He pulls out a coin purse and stares at it. “This is _mine_ ,” Rinaldo blurts. “That bastard!”

Daud checks his own belt for his coin pouch, and his hands close around thin air. Feeling vaguely mad, he starts to laugh, a quiet huffing chuckle.

Then he can’t stop and he laughs harder, gasping breaths of air that come back out as hoarse, hysterical convulsions. And then it’s not laughter anymore because his eyes are still burning and his cheeks are wet and he can’t breathe and the laughter has turned into loud, rasping sobs that won’t stop.

And his Whalers are staring at him like he’s gone insane, watching him as though they’re considering turning him into the City Watch to claim the bounty on his head. And why not? Why _shouldn’t_ they? He’ll promise to go quietly if it means they’ll just stop _looking at him like that_.

Thomas takes a tentative step forwards, his hand outreached. “Sir –”

Daud shakes his head. “I’m fine,” he gasps. “Leave me be.”

“Daud –”

“I said _leave me alone!_ ”

He transverses away blindly before Thomas’s hand can close around his arm, and wherever he ends up he pitches against the side of a water-stained wall, his breath coming in short, gasping inhalations as his hands scrabble for a purchase, a hole, anything to help him keep standing. But his unsteady hands find nothing and he hits the filthy, sodden floor with his knees, pain flaring through his joints, and covers his face with his hands to stifle the cry of agony swelling his throat.

He can’t even stand when he hears Rulfio’s quiet approach from behind him. “Sir?”

“I’m fine,” Daud lies. “Get out of here.”

“With all due respect, sir, but no.”

“I don’t need your help. I don’t need anyone’s help. I don’t – I don’t want you to –”

_I don’t want you to see me like this._

“Just breathe, sir.”

He presses his shaking hands to his face, hiding the truth. “I’m –”

“I know,” Rulfio says. His hand rests on the back of Daud’s head, pushing it down gently, and Daud lets him. “Keep your head down, sir. It’ll help.”

“Help _what_.”

“Help you breathe.”

“I’m alive,” he chokes. “I’m –”

“I know, sir. Just breathe.”

He breathes. He breathes and he breathes and he breathes as though every gulp of air he draws in is like the first he ever took when he arrived in this world, confused and scared and screaming and so very _alive_.

* * *

**live but to fight**

He stays that way for the better part of an hour, slumped on the rotting, water-choked floor in a dank, stinking corner of his hideout, weeping and breathing until he’s run out of tears and his heart no longer hammers in his chest as though trying to fracture his sternum. He slowly becomes aware of himself – aware of the dirt under his trembling hands, coarse and real through his gloves, not like a distant dream that he can’t wake up from. Aware of the fact that his knees are aching and the fabric of his pants are soaked through with floodwater, the fact that his wounds are stinging like a bitch, the fact that Rulfio is still murmuring soft encouragements, and the fact that time has not stopped and the world is still turning.

He takes one last shuddering breath, gathering his senses and wits and whatever is left of his pride, and pushes himself into an upwards sitting position. Rulfio silently hands him a vial of Sokolov’s health elixir, which he takes and drains with a grimace.

“Thanks,” he says. The wounds aren’t deep, but it still stings when the elixir rushes through his veins and begins to knit the flesh back together.

Rulfio stands and holds out his hand to help Daud up. Daud stares at him, just for a moment, then grasps his hand allows himself to be pulled to his feet with a groan, his knees creaking and his body aching.

“Rulfio…” he murmurs.

Rulfio shakes his head. “You don’t need to say anything, sir,” he says. “You did the same for me once, more than a few times. I only returned the favour. You don’t owe me any thanks.”

“Nonetheless,” Daud says.

Rulfio shrugs, that sort of embarrassed, silently pleased stance about him that he gets whenever Daud praises him. “You should go and see if Attano’s awake yet,” he suggests.

So he should, although it means facing Rinaldo and Thomas who probably think he’s certifiable and needs to be carted off to the nearest asylum. Rulfio checks him over one last time before nodding, satisfied for the moment, and transversing away, allowing Daud to gather himself before Blinking back to his office, where Rinaldo and Thomas still wait by Attano.

“Sir!” Thomas and Rinaldo blurt out in unison when he appears in his office.

Daud raises his hand to assuage them. “It’s fine,” he says, this time _not_ hysterically. “How is Attano?”

Thomas and Rinaldo share an uncertain glance, but Rinaldo clears his throat and answers.

“He’s regained a bit of consciousness, but I’m not sure for how long.”

Good enough. He inhales sharply and nods, and makes his way over to Attano’s bedside.

“Attano,” he says, and the former bodyguard’s bloodshot eyes creak open, his blurred vision eventually focusing, only briefly, on Daud’s face. The colour in his face has returned somewhat, but he still looks like death warmed over and he sounds even worse when he tries to form words.

“Wh…” Attano mumbles. “Where…”

“Flooded District,” Daud says, pressing a hand to Attano’s shoulder to prevent him from doing something stupid, like sitting up. “You collapsed after our duel. I’ve been telling everyone that I won. Hope you don’t mind.”

“…you bastard,” Attano whispers.

Heh. “So you _can_ talk,” Daud says.

“You… thought I didn’t?”

“To be honest, I was starting to think you were mute.”

Attano doesn’t laugh, and he’ll probably forget this conversation later which means Daud will get to use that line again later. Assuming there is a later, and assuming Attano survives. He hopes he does – it’s too good a quip to go unappreciated.

“I need to find her,” Attano mumbles, eyelids fluttering as he struggles to keep them open. “Keep her safe.”

“You’re not going anywhere in this state.”

Attano doesn’t care. He struggles against Daud’s hand, half-delirious. “Emily,” he moans. “She – they have her.”

“ _Who_ has her, Attano?”

“He’s losing lucidity, sir,” Rinaldo warns him.

This turns out to be a good thing, because Daud can’t envisage an alternate line of events where Corvo Attano willingly and knowingly hands over information about Emily Kaldwin to the assassin who killed her mother.

“Loyalists,” he slurs. “At the… Hound Pits Pub. They poisoned me and now they have her, and I…”

“Attano?” Daud prompts, but Attano loses consciousness, his eyes rolling back into his head and his breath coming in short, sick-sounding inhalations.

Rinaldo tsks and presses a damp cloth to Attano’s forehead. “All we can do is wait, Daud,” he says, preparing more elixir. “He’ll either live or he’ll die. It’s up to him at this point.”

“Keep him breathing, Rinaldo,” Daud says.

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

He gestures for Thomas to follow down the staircase to his desk, where his sword, wiped clean of the mud and the muck it landed it, has been laid out across it. He stares at it, and after a long time, reaches for it and sheathes it through his belt.

“Sir,” Thomas says tentatively from behind him, “if you ever need to… uh… if you ever want to talk about anything –”

Outsider’s balls. “It’s fine, Thomas,” Daud says. “I apologise for my display earlier. I’m all right.”

Thomas looks at him dubiously.

“Really,” Daud insists, though he isn’t sure how true that is even if said display certainly helped him start to work through whatever all of _this_ is. It’s as though a layer of wet cloth has been removed from around his head, a weight that he didn’t even realise was there lifted. He doesn’t know how long this feeling will last, but while it does he isn’t going to let the surge of adrenalin coursing through his body go to waste.

 _Ports of Call_ is still there, facedown on the table, its spine cracked and the edges frayed, the pages yellowed and dogeared from the number of times Daud has flicked through it in the last several days. He stares at it and, for the barest of moments, allows himself to imagine another life under the warm Serkonan sun.

It’s a nice dream.

“The Hound Pits Pub,” he eventually says, wrenching his gaze away from the book to load his wristbow with sleepdarts. “That’s in the Old Port District. Not too far – just through the sewers.”

“What are you thinking, sir?”

“I’m thinking it’s the last known location of Emily Kaldwin, and it’s the best lead we have to go on.”

He can just about hear Thomas frowning. “…Sir?”

“Attano’s not getting up anytime soon. If not for me he’d probably be halfway across Dunwall by now to rescue her.”

“Or he’d have suffocated to death in the sewers.”

“Or we’d still have a ruler who cared about saving this city and a little girl wouldn’t have watched her mother murdered before her eyes,” Daud snaps.

Thomas holds up his hands to placate him. “All I’m saying is, you don’t owe the girl any more than what you’ve already given,” he says carefully.

Daud leans against the desk, his shoulders falling, and he shakes his head. “My debt to Emily Kaldwin will never be repaid,” he murmurs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Besides, what was the point in saving her from a life of living death as Delilah’s puppet if she’s just going to spend it as a puppet for another group?”

Thomas sighs. “Are we at least getting paid for this?”

Daud manages a small smile. “My contract, my coin. You’ll all be paid.”

“That’s not what I –” Thomas hastily says, but Daud waves him off.

“Gather the elites and stock up on supplies. We’ve got a young Empress to rescue.”

“Most of our inventory ended up in Attano’s pockets.”

Coldridge must’ve fucked him up more than just the physical scars latticing his body where the prison guards pressed hot iron brands into his skin and ripped out his toenails and imposed on him other unspeakable acts of torture that would fracture another person’s mind beyond repair. Kleptomaniac tendencies weren’t part of the file Daud put together on Corvo Attano while doing recon and information-gathering for the hit on the Empress.

“Makes you wonder how he was even able to move around,” Daud mutters. “All right. We’ll head out in fifteen minutes.”

Thomas bows at the waist. “Sir.”

“Thomas,” Daud says, halting his second.

Thomas waits while Daud tries to coherently piece together what he wants to say, but in the end he just grimaces. “Thank you,” he says, wishing the words didn’t feel so foreign on his tongue. “For everything.”

Thomas starts, as though taken aback, but he replies in a tone that’s just a bit hoarser and warmer than usual. “The honour is mine, sir.”

Honour, he thinks. That’s funny. Thomas transverses away and Rinaldo pointedly gives him some space, leaving Daud alone with Attano.

He supposes he should say something profound. Make a heartfelt promise of regret and intention to repent and amend, to do right by him and Emily Kaldwin, or something to that regard.

“Try not to burn the place down,” he says.

Attano doesn’t reply.

He is about to turn away, but something stops him. He frowns and reaches for the mask on the bedside table. The face of metal is as cold as ice under his faintly trembling fingertips, but he can’t draw away. He pauses, then lifts it and makes a decision.

Attano should be the one rescuing Emily Kaldwin. But if he can’t, then the Masked Felon, at the very least, _can_. Daud fits the mask over his face – an improvement, no doubt – and adjusts the magnification specs. This is perhaps not the smartest plan he’s ever had. There are more than a few things that could go very wrong. He won’t just have to _look_ like Attano; he will have to _act_ like Attano.

The mask feels wrong, the face of an honourable man hiding one that is not, but not wrong enough to remove it.

The Outsider must be laughing his balls off.

“Wish me luck,” he says, voice muffled through the mask. Attano stays silent. “Or don’t. But you’d better not fucking die, Attano. I don’t want to bring that girl back to a corpse.”

**the taller they stand**

One by one, they fall by their own hand.

The lighthouse on Kingsparrow Island is a mess; guards facing off against guards under the orders of their various superiors under the others of those who turned on each other like rabid, starving hounds attacking an emaciated carcass for the last scrap of meat, gnawing at the bones of the city that Daud brought to its knees. Once you start ordering people killed to get your way, everything else is mere detail. The Whalers will do what they can – knock out as many guards as possible, neutralise the immediate threats and clear a safe path for Emily – an attempt to restore the order that Burrows overhauled and the Loyalist Conspirators drove knives into.

Corvo Attano did what he could to save this city from itself, but he’s only one man. He found alternatives when there should have been none; refusing to kill like an obedient lap dog on the orders of others when he had every right to, and so earned the undying loyalty of a simple boatman and the servants who survived the massacre at the Hound Pits Pub. It only takes one man to push a city off the edge, but it takes far many more to pull it back.

 _At the last moment you seem to be acquiring a curious sense of justice_ , the Outsider had said, voice mocking and black eyes narrowed _. Funny how the final days always mean so much._

If Corvo is still alive, Daud thinks, he’ll help. As best he can, if Corvo will allow him to, though it’s also entirely possible that Attano will just tell him to fuck off out of Gristol and never return.

The Loyalists are madmen and fools, traitors and manipulators, overcome with their own guilt for how they used Corvo for their dirty work and discarded him afterwards, another pawn in the game that started centuries before Hiram Burrows paid Daud to kill an Empress. Daud knows a thing or two about guilt – about how it starts as a small blackened seed, deep in your chest, steadily growing as its poisonous tendrils take root in the veins and wrap around the heart, squeezing and squeezing like the way he strangled his mother's murderer, until you cannot breathe and every waking moment of your existence is nigh unbearable. About how it drives men and women to the brink of insanity.

Treavor Pendleton has downed so much alcohol he has probably poisoned himself beyond repair, and there’s nothing Daud particularly cares to do about that, even if he could. He’ll be dead by morning, his circulation slowed to a trickle through his damaged veins and his liver rotted, or perhaps he'll drown in his own vomit. A cowardly ending for a coward.

High Overseer Teague Martin places the nozzle of his pistol into his mouth and pulls the trigger before Daud can halt time and disarm him. His brains burst from the back of his head, splattering across the ceiling in red and grey slush imbedded with shattered white skull, and his body slumps to the ground, twitching for five seconds before finally stilling.

It’s impossible to know when Admiral Farley Havelock’s mind snapped like a cheap lock, driving him to the top of the lighthouse in the middle of a thunderstorm, dragging the future Empress of the Isles up with him.

“No!” she screams. “Let me _go!_ ”

For a child of ten, she fights back well – as best she can against a seasoned Admiral whose grip alone is likely to snap her wrist if he squeezes too hard, or jerks her the wrong way. “Hold still,” he snaps, yanking Emily closer to the edge, “just hold still, you stupid girl –”

She bites him. Havelock snarls and backhands Emily across the face, the sound of flesh striking flesh carrying through the wind. Nausea floods his body as he remembers doing that to another Empress, his gloved hand smashing across Jessamine Kaldwin’s terrified, pale face to separate her from her beloved daughter before driving her up against the stone for the final blow.

This ends. Now.

Daud steps forward onto the platform.

Havelock sees him immediately – or rather, sees the mask. He hauls Emily in front of his body, his heels kissing the slippery edge of the platform, his arm around her neck as she writhes and kicks in his hold. “Stay where you are, Corvo,” he screams, eyes wild, “or I’ll jump and take her with me!”

“Corvo,” Emily screams, “help!”

And Havelock pitches backwards.

It’s as though he is back in the Brigmore Mansion and Delilah is moments, seconds away from destroying a little girl’s mind with a black magic ritual. _In your long life I’ve rarely seen you act with such consummate grace_ , the Outsider had whispered, as Daud slipped by unseen to switch the painting of Emily Kaldwin for an abstract work of the Void, but his grace was out of necessity, not for the sake of being graceful. He thought it would be first and only time the life of Emily Kaldwin hung in the balance, dependent on him getting the timing exact. One second too soon and Delilah would be alerted; one second too late and Emily would die.

There is no time to be graceful here.

He halts time and runs through the suspended rain, a crack of lightning splitting the sky in the distance, and he throws out his hand to reach for Emily Kaldwin, her fall frozen for a precious few seconds –

Then time resumes and Emily falls and his trembling hand captures hers a second before she slips away forever, while Havelock screams and plummets below until his cry is drowned out by a blow of thunder, shaking the very foundations of the lighthouse itself. Daud breathes and pulls her to safety, helping her crawl onto the platform, shaking and shivering but _alive_.

“Cor—” she starts to say, then the smile falters as she takes in his clothes, his build, the gloves on his hands, and the light in her eyes is wiped away by fear and distrust and she cringes from his touch, crawling backwards across the platform to get away from him. “You’re not Corvo,” she whispers. “Who are you? Why do you have his mask?”

Until this day, Daud has never been ashamed of his face. Though he isn’t especially fond of it – it’s too worn, too weary and too scarred to be considered striking, let alone in the same realm of conventional attractiveness – it’s the only face he has and one he’s never concealed from the public. The Knife of Dunwall is not a hidden figure of mystery – he is Dunwall’s assassin for the nobles, someone whose name and contacts are passed around through the aristocracy like a dirty little secret that isn’t a secret at all. His face is plastered across every WANTED poster from here to the zones under quarantine, from the walls outside the Boyle Estate to the sewers where the Weepers are rounded up and left to die. Anton Sokolov himself painted a portrait – _without_ Daud’s permission – and titled it with his name.

And he has never, ever worn a mask when taking out his targets – whether he’d snuck up on them from an alleyway and shot them in the back with a hardbolt, or whether he’d appeared before them in broad daylight on a gazebo, and stared them in the eyes while driving his sword through their chest. He had no reason to hide his face when he was proud, when the Knife of Dunwall had the Outsider's favour and felt powerful and _special_.

He’s never wanted to be someone else, anyone else, as much he does right now. _Who are you_ , Emily Kaldwin has asked, and he’s not certain he wants her to know.

But she deserves to. She, more than anyone, deserves to look upon the same ugly scarred face she saw on the worst day of her life so far six months ago – the face of a monster, a murderer, the man who drove a blade through her mother’s heart and stilled it. He wanted to leave this place and fade from the memories of all who live in this wretched world, but there are two people who will never be able to forget no matter how far he'd planned on running.

Lady Emily, future Empress of the Isles, watches him remove the mask of her saviour only to reveal the face of her nightmares.

“No,” she whispers, shaking her head. “No. Not you. No –”

“Lady Emily,” he murmurs.

“You –” she chokes out, eyes wide and face as pale as the moon. “Not you. You – what have you done with Corvo? Did you – have you killed him too?”

The assumption is far from unreasonable, but no less painful. “No,” Daud says, kneeling before her. “I’m here to take you back to him.”

She crawls further away from him, hands scrabbling on the metal grating. “Why should I trust _you_?” she hisses.

Smart girl. “You shouldn’t,” Daud replies. “You are the only person you can ever trust, and no one else. Remember that. It’ll save your life one day.”

Her mother was a good, kind woman – a fair Empress who loved her city and its people and would have done anything to save them all from the plague. But she trusted a man who brought rats with a deadly plague into the slums in an attempt to wipe out the disadvantaged, a man who hired a contract killer to kill her and kidnap her daughter, all for the game of politics.

Emily Kaldwin is ten years old and shouldn’t have had to learn this harsh lesson so young, but innocence is a luxury and the world is a cruel, unforgiving place. Especially for Empresses. She will never make the same mistake her mother did. Not now.

Not ever again.

“Lady Emily,” he says. “We have to go.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you!”

He doesn’t hold out his hand to her, knowing she will not take it if offered. “If I wanted to kidnap you, I’d be done with it by now,” he points out. “I have no reason to lie to you. Samuel Beechworth is waiting with a boat for us. If Corvo is still alive, he’ll want to see you.”

Her eyes flash at hearing the boatman’s name. “Still alive?” she whispers, face pale. “What’s wrong with him? What did you do to him?”

It’s only right she knows – and it’s only right she is warned that Corvo Attano might not even be breathing anymore by the time they get back.

“Havelock and the other Loyalists poisoned him,” Daud says.

She’s silent for a long time, allowing the wind and rain to lash at her face and her hair. “Will he – will he be okay?”

“I don’t know.”

Emily releases a small noise, a whimper almost, and clenches her fists in the soaked frills of her white dress.

He unlatches his pistol from its holster slowly, and shows it to her. “Do you know how to use one of these?”

Her eyes flick across it. “Yes.”

He turns it over and holds it out for her, handle first, and she cautiously – very cautiously – takes it from his hand. The chance that she’ll turn it on him and fire before he even has the chance to halt time and step out of the bullet’s way is one he’ll just have to risk.

“Will you come with me now?” he asks.

She tightens her grip on the gun. “You’ll take me to Corvo,” she says, and it is neither a question nor a plea.

He bows his head. “I will.”

The way down is long, and his Whalers have ensured that there are no guards in their way to stop them. Emily Kaldwin is silent the entire way, a step behind him and the pistol that is just a little too big for her hands aimed at his back. Samuel Beechworth waits with the _Amaranth_ in the distance, the rain slowing and the sirens fading as the guards who are left steadily realise that the cross-fighting is over.

“The others,” Emily finally says. “The traitors. Are they dead, too?”

“Yes,” Daud says. “Or as good as, by their own hands.”

For a moment he thinks she is disappointed, but then she exhales softly and bows her head, staring down at the pistol in her small hands. “Emily was there when the killing started,” the woman Cecelia had said back at the Hound Pits Pub, thinking he was Corvo, a whimper wavering in her tone and her pale face pinched with fear. “Poor child. I hope she hid her eyes.”

Even if Emily didn’t, what difference would it have made? The girl has already seen her mother skewered on the end of Daud’s sword; there’s not a lot that a child can witness after something like that which fundamentally alters the initial trauma. Being introduced to death like that at such a young age only does one of two things to a person, and for the barest of moments Daud hopes beyond all else that it hasn’t done to Emily what it did to him.

But then he catches a glint of steel in her eyes, the same expression he remembers seeing when he was fourteen years old and glaring into a mirror, the Overseer’s blood still covering his hands and face and clothes.

“Good,” Emily Kaldwin says, her voice as cold as the Pandyssian ice waters. “I was going to have them killed anyway.”

She looks up at him, meets his gaze with steely eyes that have no place on the face of a ten-year-old girl, and he sees neither Corvo Attano nor Jessamine Kaldwin in her expression.

“I’m going to be Empress.”

He isn’t sure if it is admiration he feels, or despair.

* * *

Corvo Attano is alive.

“I thought you were dead,” Emily weeps, throwing herself into the Royal Protector’s arms. Though he’s still weak and can barely keep himself sitting up straight, he holds her back with all the force he can muster. “I thought he killed you. I thought you were –”

“No, I’m fine, Emily,” Attano says hoarsely. “I’m fine.”

Daud sets the mask down on the bedside table, mindful of Attano’s burning gaze on him as he does so.

“You saved her,” Attano murmurs, holding Emily close.

“You weren’t exactly in a position to do it yourself,” Daud points out.

Attano stares at him, as though he has no idea what to say.

That’s fine. Daud isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say either, or how he's supposed to express the crushing relief weakening his body at the knowledge that Corvo has survived and will be fine, so he walks away to where Thomas and Rulfio are waiting for him to give the Empress and her father...ly figure a semblance of privacy.

“What now, sir?” Thomas asks quietly.

It’s a good question.

“…I don’t know,” he admits after a pregnant pause, and it feels so good to finally put into words what he’s pretended he hasn’t been feeling for six straight months, like a vice loosening around his chest. He _doesn’t_ know. He thought he wanted to disappear from this cold, dank, rotting city and never come back. But that isn’t realistic, not anymore. “I’m not the same person I was. I can’t…” He breaks off with a bone-weary sigh, and bows his head. “I can’t go back to what I used to do.”

Rulfio and Thomas share a glance. “We… sort of worked that out already, sir.”

Smart asses, the both of them. Billie had worked that out too. She'd watched Daud, first with curiosity then with calculation, her gaze raising the hairs on the back of his neck in the weeks leading up to her betrayal. She'd learned from him, killed on his orders, and then she saw him losing his grip and decided to take his place.

How much of that was Delilah's doing, Daud wonders, and how much of it was Billie's own choice? If she'd just waited, if she'd just been patient. If he'd noticed sooner, that Delilah had seduced her somehow and manipulated her, she wouldn't have felt the need to betray him.

He'd have given her everything.

But Billie is gone and the ones who remain are still here, and Daud doesn't deserve their loyalty and love anymore than he deserves his life. He sighs.

“If you want to take over…” he suggests to Thomas. “The men trust you. They’ll follow you. Or if you want to set out, do something else and find your own path… I’ve been saving coin, enough for almost everyone here to start fresh. It’s up to you.”

“That’s a lot of coin,” Thomas says. “No one saves that much coin unless they have a plan.”

“Yeah, well,” Daud replies, “I’m putting the vineyard on hold for now.”

He can almost hear Thomas’s eyebrows shoot up through his whaling mask. “You?” he says dubiously. “A vineyard?”

“Sure. I like the sun. I like grapes. I like grapes when they’re fermented.”

“I think it’s a bit more complicated than that, sir,” Thomas says. “What will you be doing instead?”

He looks up to where Corvo and Emily are embraced, and he finds Corvo’s eyes on him still. Daud holds his gaze while Corvo scans his face as though searching for something, though what, Daud isn’t sure. Whatever it is, Corvo seems to find it because his expression softens, the frown easing and the corner of his mouth curving, just ever so slightly, into a smile.

Daud is alive, when another by any other’s hand he would and _should_ be rightfully dead. And now, he thinks he knows what to do with the second chance he doesn’t deserve. That odd feeling comes over him again, and this time Daud is able to identify it. It’s an urge, an overwhelming desire – a deep, aching _longing_ , swelling in his chest – to do _right_ by Corvo Attano.

“I have a debt that cannot be repaid in coin,” Daud finally answers Thomas, still holding Corvo’s eyes. “My life is in their hands.”

“Then…” Thomas says, almost tentatively, “if it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d like to come with you.”

He reluctantly breaks his gaze with Attano and turns to face his second. “The Empress’s death isn’t your burden, Thomas.”

Thomas shrugs. “It is, though,” he says. “It’s all of ours. We all were part of that job. So I’m sorry if you don’t like it, sir, but I’m coming with you.”

“Same here,” Rulfio says. “And I know most of the others will, too.”

“I may just end up on a chopping block,” Daud points out, thinking of Emily Kaldwin’s eyes of steel.

“Well… we probably won’t follow you _that_ far,” Rulfio says.

“Except perhaps Rinaldo,” Thomas says, glancing sideways to where Rinaldo is waving his hands around and asking questions faster than Sokolov, who is looking increasingly irritable and searching for an escape route from his rabid fan, can answer them. “I think he’s about to ask for Sokolov’s hand in marriage.”

Daud meets Corvo Attano’s eyes again over the back of Emily’s shoulder. _My life is in your hands_ , he thinks, and for the first time in six months or maybe far longer than he ever realised, he feels at peace. His hands still tremble and there's still so much he doesn't know of what the future holds, but maybe that’s all right. He starts to laugh, and this time, it’s real.

* * *

**a now distant sound**

“You should really get a lock for this door.”

Even with the advantage of powers of the Void, Corvo _still_ manages to sneak up on Daud, but it stopped being disconcerting more than a year ago. The corner of Daud’s mouth twists into something resembling a smile and he looks up from his desk, watching Corvo make his way into the attic which he has made his office and home.

“I used to live in a flooded building with half of its walls and roof missing,” Daud points out. “I have no use for a lock.”

“You might,” Corvo says. “You’re a good-looking man still in your prime. It’s not implausible to think you’d want to bring company back to your room sometime.”

“At least one of those things you said was a blatant lie, Attano.”

Corvo smirks, that familiar, _cursed_ expression of genuine mirth with just a little bit of teasing that tugs hard at a spot deep in Daud’s chest. One and a half years later and it _still_ drives him insane.

It isn’t just the smirking. There are the occasional times Corvo grasps his elbow, or brushes his left hand – now covered – across the small of his back when following him through a doorway or corridor, just one step behind. It’s the way Daud sometimes catches Corvo _watching_ him, with that intense and curious gaze as though always analysing him.

The worst part is, Daud doesn’t think he even minds. Things like this, right now. Corvo swings around the desk to stand at Daud’s side, leaning just a little too close, his tone just a little too low and husky, but not crossing any obvious boundaries that would put this interaction in the realm of ‘indecent’. Thomas suggested that it might be an intimidation tactic, a way to keep Daud in his place, which in Daud’s opinion seems unlikely.

More likely Corvo is just pickpocketing him again.

Asshole.

“What’s all this?” Corvo asks, sweeping his hand across the papers strewn across the desk, his shoulder touching Daud’s.

Daud clears his throat, disliking the way his face warms at the proximity, and pulls away to gather the documents. “Travel plans.”

“Cullero?” Corvo says. “You’ve been planning to move to Cullero for a year and a half. Admit it, it’s just not going to happen. What are you even going to _do_ there? Bore yourself to death?”

“I was thinking about starting a vineyard.”

“You?” he asks dubiously. “A vigneron?”

“Why not? I like the sun. I like grapes. I like wine.”

“I think being a vigneron involves a bit more than that.”

Daud narrows his eyes. “You’re starting to sound like Thomas. Have you been talking about me behind my back?”

Corvo just smirks again, and neither confirms nor denies. “Your report?” he says, finally stepping away.

The last year and a half has seen Daud’s group of Whalers – former assassins recruited from the worst of Dunwall’s slums, forgotten about by the upper class and trodden on by the Guard as children – swiftly integrate with the palace into the service of Empress Emily Drexel Lela Kaldwin I. Some left, unhappy with the way Daud stopped taking contracts, and lucked out on their own to continue their own assassination group in Dunwall, like Galia, to varying degrees of success. Others took the money Daud offered and vanished, like Misha and Petra and Vladko. Jenkins, Aedan and Anthony joined the City Watch; Kieron and Devon joined the Royal Guard.

Rinaldo apprenticed himself to Sokolov, without Sokolov’s permission.

Thomas and Rulfio have stayed by Daud’s side, without titles, working for him and therefore Emily Kaldwin and Corvo Attano in an unofficial, spy networking capacity.

It’s… a good life. Not necessarily the one he thinks he might have chosen for himself. He wonders sometimes what he’d be doing now if Corvo hadn’t collapsed after their duel – if Daud hadn’t felt the overwhelming urge to make amends and save Emily when Corvo could not. He doubts it would be better than the one he has now. He has a purpose, he has his head on his shoulders, he has a roof over his head, and most of his men received a second chance at the lives he’d stolen from them when he’d put blades in their hands and masks over their faces.

“Are you… happy here, sir?” Thomas had tentatively asked.

The concept of ‘happiness’ exists in the form of a distant memory, of a cool, smooth beaker in his hand as his mother poured into it a liquid that smelled as sweet as a summer flower but could kill him faster and more painfully than a knife to the chest, her gentle voice humming a song from her own childhood, a strange and discordant Pandyssian tune that he has never been able to replicate no matter how hard he tries. The closest he’s ever come to that feeling during his time in Dunwall was in front of a crackling fireplace in the dead of the Month of High Cold, Billie and the others huddled around it and telling jokes.

 _Happiness_ is not something he’s sure he deserves, and even if he did, it’s always just that little bit out of reach.

He’s okay with that.

“I’m content,” Daud had replied, and there was no lie in that.

“My men have estimated a low threat level for the second anniversary commemoration,” Daud answers Corvo, pulling out the report he put together using the combined information that Thomas and Rulfio had gathered. “There are the usual murmurs from groups looking to stir trouble for the sake of it – gangs and the like – but most of those have been neutralised and the others are all bluster and no plans. We’ll keep an eye on them regardless. We took the temperature on the streets to get a feel for the general population’s attitude towards the throne. Since the plague has come under control and is close to elimination, the average folk are grateful and have high levels of support for Emily. The nobles are a mixture of supportive for the sake of their own standing or disgruntled because they’ve missed out on a good foothold in her court, and the… other lot –” – the ones who were in the throes of planning a coup a few months ago, the only few outraged by Hiram Burrows' public execution – “– are no longer part of the equation. Support for the Empress is at an all-time high.”

Corvo nods. “Good. Great work,” he says. “Thanks.”

“ _Your_ reputation, on the other hand,” Daud adds, halting his exit.

“Mine?” Corvo says, eyebrows high. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Aside from the nobles complaining that various _items_ of theirs go missing every time you pay them a visit, and the fact that you could probably stand to shave and take a shower once in a while –”

“Watch yourself,” Corvo growls.

“– they think you’re too close to the throne.” Daud lifts his eyebrows. “A bad influence on the young Empress’s mind – guiding her to your will, instead of keeping to your role as bodyguard. Some are even saying you’re a heretic, which can’t _possibly_ be true.”

Corvo rolls his eyes. “Names?”

“I have a few I plan to pay a visit to. But they haven’t started saying it on their own accord,” Daud says, and withdraws from his desk drawer a flyer. “They’ve been stirred by this charming piece of vitriol.”

Anti-imperial propaganda littering the streets of Dunwall and beyond is not uncommon. When Daud lived in the rundown apartments and buildings as the poorest areas succumbed to poverty and plague, the occasional poster here and there decrying the Kaldwins as unfeeling tyrants grew more common, but the common thread to such posters and flyers was a lack of professional craftsmanship behind them. They were usually hand-drawn and amateurish, or printed on dodgy machines with poor-quality ink onto paper that disintegrated after a single downpour of rain. The slushed remains would be washed down the streets and clog the drainage, and rot in the waters of the Flooded District for months before Emily began the process of reclaiming the Flooded District.

This flyer is different. It’s on paper produced typically for the upper classes, sturdy and well-manufactured, and the ink is a rich, dark emerald of fine quality, an uncommon and expensive colour that does not find its way easily to those who can barely afford a loaf of bread. Daud is no artist – and any appreciation he had for anything art-related was promptly soured by Delilah Copperspoon – but even he can tell the difference between a work by an amateur from a seasoned professional.

Corvo Attano’s face on the flyer is an almost perfect replication of the real man. The intensity of his gaze, the slight scowl of his mouth when he is displeased with something, his hair uncut and his face unshaven. Whoever has drawn this knows Corvo on a first-hand basis – or at the very least, knows him through a professional capacity, which doesn't narrow suspects down.

Most troublingly, the drawn Corvo holds up the back of his left hand – which is emblazoned with a poor replication of the Mark of the Outsider.

_DENOUNCE THE WITCH CORVO ATTANO!_

_BRING HIM TO JUSTICE AND SAVE OUR YOUNG EMPRESS’S MIND FROM HIS HERETICAL INFLUENCE AND FALSE GUIDANCE!_

_SAVE OUR EMPIRE FROM THE TOUCH OF THE OUTSIDER AND HIS SERVANT!_

There’s no signature.

Corvo stares at it for a long time, unblinking. “ _Witch?_ ”

“Out of everything on that flyer, _that’s_ what you choose to take offense with?” Daud says.

Corvo snorts, crushing it in his hand. “Find out where it came from,” he says, dropping it into the wastebin beside the desk.

“It’s a priority.”

Corvo nods and makes a move to leave.

“Attano,” Daud says, halting him again.

Corvo turns. “Yes?”

He walks around his desk and stands before Corvo, holding out his hand. “Give it back.”

A few seconds pass, and eventually Corvo grimaces, a sheepish look on his face, and reluctantly withdraws a coin pouch from inside his jacket. Just before he drops it into Daud’s hand, his eyes flick down, seeing the tremors running through his fingers.

Daud is too old to blush from embarrassment, and this has been going on for far too long for it to be considered out of the ordinary. His Whalers – they’ve dispersed and found new lives, new jobs, new titles, but they’ll always be his – don’t mention it anymore. Sokolov’s professional medical assessment of the issue a year prior came to conclusion that it was ‘chronic’, perhaps a sign of age or an undiagnosed psychosomatic illness and that the shaking would either stop on its own or stay for good. So Daud has just come to accept the fine tremors running through his hands, keeping them at a constant, almost imperceptible vibration, which his leather gloves hide just as well as they do his own Mark.

Corvo Attano is the only one left now who notices.

Daud clears his throat, and Corvo looks back up, meeting his gaze as he drops his hand, holding the pouch, into Daud’s, his fingers lingering just a little too long.

“Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all.

Daud weighs the pouch in his hand and lifts a dismayed eyebrow. “ _All_ of it, please.”

Corvo scowls and burrows through his pocket, pulling out a handful of loose coins to drop into the pouch. Daud sighs and puts the money away, tucking the pouch deep into his pocket.

“You’ve got a problem, bodyguard. I’m going to start chaining all my things down. _Don’t_ think I haven’t noticed that my maps go randomly missing.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Corvo mutters. “Oh, and before I forget – Emily wants to see you when you’re free. She just told her parliament and advisors that she’s finally decided on a Spymaster.”

This is news to Daud. He knew her advisors were pressuring her to name one, as they’ve been under the impression that Corvo has been splitting his duties between Lord Protectoring and Spymastering since she claimed the throne, but no one trustworthy who Emily might have chosen to fill the vacant role comes to mind.

He grunts, narrowing his eyes. “She has, has she?” he says, displeased that this information hasn’t passed his desk. “Who is this person? Do we know them?”

Corvo is silent for a moment, then the corner of his mouth twitches. “No idea,” he says. “She didn’t want to give them the name to them – said it defeated the point of having a Spymaster. You should ask her.”

“I will.”

“Daud,” Corvo adds, after a terse moment, “there’s another matter. For the… commemoration –”

And just like that, whatever façade of ease between the two of them vanishes faster than a priceless heirloom vanishing in Corvo’s proximity.

It’s not as though he ever entertained the notion that Corvo and Emily would forgive him, and the pain that strikes his chest is not that of longing for something which he knows he will never attain and something he will never be deserving of. Their forgiveness is something he’s not even sure he wants – and even if they did provide it, it won’t alter the debt he owes them.

Corvo Attano has met him at a halfway point Daud never considered possible. He doesn’t know if he can call them friends – not yet, maybe not ever – but a mutual understanding, no matter how deep, will never wash away the blood of Jessamine Kaldwin on his hands.

“I’ll keep myself sparse,” Daud promises, looking away now.

Corvo nods again, expression grim, and leaves.

* * *

Emily, to put it politely, tolerates him – and that’s only because Corvo asked her to and vouched for his trustworthiness. And only _then_ did she accept this because she acknowledges that Daud saved her life that day on Kingsparrow Island, while also never letting him forget that he was the one who ruined her life in the first place.

By all accounts, Emily was a sweet girl before the day she saw her mother murdered before her eyes. A little precocious and very bright, if a bit too much of a daydreamer. Jessamine was criticised frequently by her advisors about the way she was raising her daughter – that there not enough emphasis on governing and the duties of a future Empress, and too much leisure time spent on drawings, playing games, and being raised in the safe confines of the palace, away from the muck and the cruelty that plagued Dunwall’s streets long before Burrows imported Pandyssian rats.

There are elements of that sweet, daydreaming girl who is too smart for her own good still in Empress Emily Drexel Lela Kaldwin the First. Her steely eyes glaze over during parliament sessions, her mind wandering to stories of pirate fights and battles; her hands drift during penning state letters, the words transforming into pictures. Sometimes she hums to herself, and other days she smiles, usually when Corvo is by her side, indulging her requests to play games of hide and seek.

The nobles coo over her, saying how much like her mother she is, but Daud thinks this couldn’t be further from the truth. She has the look of her mother, it’s true – Emily Kaldwin’s features are stronger, darker than Jessamine’s, not quite as delicate, but she emulates her mother as best she can with her hair swept into a high bun and her frilly white dresses swapped out for black-cut jackets and coats. But her eyes are Corvo Attano’s in colour and shape, and sometimes – only sometimes – Daud catches a glint of a burning expression he’s only seen once before on her father’s face.

Daud feels as though he’s died twice in his life – first at the age of fourteen, staring into the mirror after strangling his mother’s murderer to death, and again at the age of forty-two, reborn weeping on the filthy, water-logged floor of the rotting Chamber of Commerce. He wonders if Emily feels as though she died, too – an Empress now in place of that sweet, innocent girl on the gazebo so long ago. She hides her fury and anger well, behind sharp cutting sentences and a firm pragmatism that will one day mark her as one of the Empire’s finest rulers in history, or the Isles’ most terrifying tyrant.

“Don’t spy on me,” Emily says, looking up from the letters she was pretending to read. “I don’t like it.”

“It took you two minutes to realise I was here,” Daud says, stepping out into the open to the centre of her office, before her desk. “Corvo can’t be at your side every waking second. Pay better attention to your surroundings.”

“I am not one of your Whalers, Daud,” Emily says. “When I want your advice, I’ll request it.”

“You never do, though,” he points out. “I get tired of waiting.”

“Perhaps that was intentional on my part,” is her terse response.

Daud _likes_ Emily Kaldwin.

He also hates that he was the one to do this to her. People like him – people like Emily – burn hot, and then burn up. All he can do is be there for that inevitable day when the anger and fury and bitterness runs its course.

“Corvo told me you wanted to see me about this new Spymaster you’ve named,” Daud says. “Why wasn’t I informed of this? Who is it?”

Emily stares at him with a sort of disdain that only a twelve-year-old girl who also happens to be the Empress of the Isles can muster. “I hope that wasn’t a serious question, or I shall have to reconsider my decision,” she says coolly.

Oh.

Corvo Attano, Daud thinks, is an _asshole_.

“Me?” Daud says, mildly outraged. “You didn’t even _ask_. What if I’d said no? Was I supposed to sign a contract? Why haven’t you been paying me wages for the past year?”

“You’re under the impression you have a choice in the matter,” Emily replies, “and you get paid in the comfort of keeping your head on your shoulders.”

It wouldn’t be a proper day if it ended without the daily reminder.

“Your title is only making official what you’ve been doing for the past year,” Emily says. “It isn’t an indication of my favour.”

“I realise.”

“But I do believe you to be – trustworthy. Devoted to your promise to me, if nothing else.” She rifles through her drawer and pulls out a flyer – _DENOUNCE THE WITCH CORVO ATTANO!_ – and shows it to him. “One of your men passed this along. I won’t have the Lord Protector slandered by religious fanatics. Find out where it’s from, and make sure it stops. By whatever means necessary.”

The corner of Daud’s mouth twitches, though he suspects smiling in this instance would be considered an inappropriate response. He bows to her instead. “Empress.”

“Spymaster Daud,” she replies, and dismisses him with a wave of her hand.

* * *

**as sure as the night**

“As you well know,” High Overseer Gerard Magnus says, pacing through the throne room alongside the Royal Protector, “the Abbey’s support for the Empress is unquestionable and unshakeable.”

Daud hovers above them in the shadows, Blinking from rafter to rafter to watch them as they walk. Corvo’s hands are clasped behind his back, but Daud is willing to bet that he’s already stolen the High Overseer’s coin pouch, medallions, and letters from his pockets.

“Your support for the Empress isn’t in doubt,” Corvo replies. Several palace servants bow their heads as he and Magnus walk by. “But we have reason to believe that the recent flyers spreading across Dunwall may have come from within the Abbey.”

After Jessamine Kaldwin's death, Hiram Burrows' term as Lord Regent saw the Overseers given leave to work with impunity within Dunwall and deployed to act as though they were the City Watch. During the time of the plague, Campbell secured the Abbey's authority to prosecute civilians for religious crimes and was able to sentence guilty parties at their discretion. Seizure of property, public humiliation, prison, execution - Daud had seen all of this and more during those six dark months. Overseers acted as though they were the judges, juries and executioners of the entire city, using their beliefs in cleansing Dunwall of occult practices and witchcraft to cover for their pedestrian crimes. That showed little sign of ending under Martin’s brief reign, but once Corvo reinstated Emily to the throne swift arrangements were made with the new High Overseer, and the Abbey of the Everyman retreated to its role pre-plague.

Daud knows better than anyone what happens when religious fanatics are permitted to enforce their own law with a sword. When he thinks of his mother he tries to remember her as she was - her glinting dark eyes and the deft, elegant movements of her hands as she mixed her poisons, the discordant but soothing sound of her voice as she hummed over her work. Whoever the man who fathered him was, Daud inherited few of his features; physically, he took after his mother who was no great beauty, but what she lacked prettiness she made up in intellect and wit, a biting and vicious tongue that terrified any who dared cross her the wrong way. He tries to think of the way she splashed a corrosive poison in the face of a man lunging towards him at the age of seven with a knife, fury in her dark eyes and her protective arms holding his head tightly against her chest until the man stopped convulsing and his screams faded.

But other times when he sees an Overseer's mask, his mind jams like a sound card shoved too hard into an audiograph, the sound skipping and playing a few grating seconds of ruptured noise over and over again. Instead, he thinks of his mother on the floor of their small apartment, her nose crushed and her chest caved in, her skin swollen blue and black and split, the blood oozing out of every possible orifice. He thinks of her dark eyes, wide open and glazed over, the fire in them stomped out by the boots of men made too powerful by fanaticism.

Authority like that is intoxicating. It makes men believe they are gods, makes them feel special. Which is why Daud has a fair amount of trouble believing that the Abbey’s support for the Empress – or rather Corvo Attano, the guiding force behind her throne – is “unquestionable and unshakeable”. High Overseer Gerard Magnus is by all accounts a good man, but no one enjoys losing that much potential power, much less to a child Empress whose bodyguard _allegedly_ was the one to orchestrate Campbell’s fall from grace.

“I assure you,” High Overseer Magnus says, “the flyers have not originated from within our ranks. And besides, Lord Protector, it’s hardly as though there’s any truth to them.”

Daud has a rule about not tempting fate, because shit always, _always_ happens.

He experiences the next five seconds as fifteen. The servant Corvo passed only moments ago steps forward until he’s barely two meters away from the Lord Protector, a manic glaze in his eyes, and raises his right arm that is covered by a white towel, and through the Void’s vision Daud sees the outline of a crossbow hidden beneath it.

“ _CORVO!_ ” Daud yells, the same time the servant screams, “ _Death to witch Corvo Attano!_ ” and fires.

They freeze time simultaneously, the world cast in shades of grey and black, and Daud watches in disbelieving horror as Corvo – seemingly by instinct – stares at the bolt suspended a hair’s breadth from between his eyes and plucks it from the air, frowning at it. The High Overseer beside him is frozen in his state of shock, eyes wide and caught in a mid-step backwards, looking not at the assailant but directly at the bolt that was about to split Corvo’s head.

Which means when time resumes, the High Overseer will have seen Corvo Attano, Lord Protector and apparent completely normal human being with no supernatural powers or heretical artefacts on him, snatch a speeding bolt out of the air.

Daud feels the vibrations of time about to resume crackle through the air, like electricity on his tongue, and can think of only one thing to do. He aims his wristbow at the space behind Corvo’s head, and fires.

His aim has been imperfect ever since his blade stilled Jessamine Kaldwin’s heart, but imperfect aim suits this situation just fine. Time resumes; everything happens at once. Corvo jerks his hand holding the bolt behind his back, and Daud’s shot shatters a cabinet directly behind Corvo, Magnus cries out in alarm, and the Royal Guards trailing Corvo tackle the would-be assassin to the ground, slamming him down on the tiles and stomping down hard on his hand, crushing the crossbow.

“Thank goodness he missed!” High Overseer Magnus exclaims, and Daud sags against the rafter, throat dry and heart pounding so hard he fears it will shatter his sternum.

* * *

The moment Corvo is alone again, Daud Blinks down to him and shoves him behind a bookcase, gripping him by the shoulders. “Are you all right?” he asks, voice hoarse.

“I’m fine,” Corvo says.

Daud exhales, a shaky release of air. “Next time,” he says, “how about you _don’t_ snatch a bolt out the air as it’s flying towards your face, and just step aside instead?”

“You stop time to catch bolts all the time,” Corvo points out.

“At night,” Daud says. “On rooftops. Where the High Overseer himself can’t see me literally catch a bolt out of thin air at the speed of light.”

“He didn’t see anything – he just thinks the servant was a bad shot. Quick thinking, by the way,” Corvo says. “Thank you.”

Daud tries to say ‘you’re welcome’, but he realises he’s shaking too hard and his heart has not slowed. He lets go of Corvo’s arms and gives him some space.

Corvo doesn’t notice. He examines the bolt intended for his head, frowning at it. “I’ll have a chat with the fellow who just tried to kill me to find out if he was acting alone or if he was sent by someone.”

“Take an armed guard with you,” Daud says.

“That’s not neces—”

“ _Take_ ,” Daud repeats, “an armed guard with you, or I will assign it myself.”

Corvo blinks at him, then the corner of his mouth curves into an infuriating smile. “Are you worried about me, Daud?”

Worried? He feels like he’s going to be sick. “Clearly someone here has to be,” Daud replies.

Corvo watches him steadily, his gaze burning as he searches for something in Daud’s face. “What a strange man you are,” he murmurs with that smile that tugs hard at a spot deep in Daud’s chest. “Fine. I trust you’ll make your own inquiries. Keep safe.”

After Corvo has left, Daud summons Thomas and Rulfio with the Arcane Bond.

“Does this has to do with the flyers, sir?”

“Almost certainly,” Daud replies. “Thomas, you take the City Watch – convene with Jenkins and the others in the Watch and the Royal Guard, and see what you can dig up. Curnow should be in the clear but find out if any of the other soldiers have heard chatter on the streets. Rulfio, you infiltrate the Blind Sisters and see what the High Oracle knows. I’m going to check out the Overseers.”

“You think the Oracular Order has something to do with the pamphlets?” Rulfio says dubiously.

“Maybe not directly, but the Overseers take their cues from the Order,” Daud says. “In theory. By all accounts Magnus is in the High Oracle’s pocket.”

“Odessa White is publicly very supportive of the Empress.”

“They all are, but Corvo just exposed himself as a heretic in front of the High Overseer himself. It could have been orchestrated by any of those groups – it benefits them all to have him brought down on heresy charges if it means they get a clear shot at the throne.”

But it benefits the Overseers most of all.

“Attano doesn’t exactly act like the heretics we’ve come across,” Thomas points out. “It’s not as though he dances naked under the moonlight and prostrates himself in front of shrines. Is waiting the propaganda out an option?”

“A few months ago I saw him eat a white rat raw when he ran out of Joplin’s elixir,” Daud says.

Thomas audibly gags. “I could’ve done without that knowledge, sir.”

“I’m just saying, there _is_ enough proof against him if someone important decides to take the flyers seriously, or if the flyers have come _from_ someone important,” Daud says.

The Empress, despite her impressive hold over parliament for someone of her age, is still at the end of the day only twelve years old. If the Overseers make a move, so early into her popular but tenuous reign, there’s little he believes she could do to save Corvo from their fanaticism. Not if she wants to remain Empress without a river of blood, and he doesn’t put it past her.

He’ll save her from herself, if he can. That means saving Corvo.

“Gear up and head out. I’d like to find out who’s behind this before the commemoration.”

That gives them three days. Thomas and Rulfio nod and transverse away.

Alone now, Daud leans against the wall. _He’s fine_ , he thinks, _Corvo is fine_ , the blind panic lingers, keeping his heart racing in his chest and his hands trembling harder than ever.

* * *

Before he even opens his eyes he knows he’s been dragged into the Void. There’s a particular _smell_ about it, a _feel_ , one that he hasn’t had the displeasure of experiencing in more than a year and frankly one he was hoping to avoid for even longer. The musty air of his attic in Dunwall Tower is gone, washed away by the faintest scent of salt water; when he swings his legs over the edge of his bed, the wooden floor is replaced by cold rock, splitting the room and winding out into the soft pastel blues of the Void.

It’s a hell of a lot colder, too, and the only thing he’s wearing is a shirt.

Daud swears, and gets up to go and find the black-eyed bastard. “Don’t you have better things to do than play games of hide-and-seek?” he snaps, Blinking across to the other suspended half of his room. “Where are you, you piece of –”

“Out of all my Marked, Daud,” the Outsider’s silky smooth voice interrupts from behind him, “you are the most disagreeable by far when called into the Void from your rest.”

The god of the Void appears in a rush of ash, pale and ethereal as ever, his dark eyes boring into Daud with as much intensity as the day he first appeared. Though Daud has never been the wonderstruck kind – he did, after all, try to take a knife to the Outsider in their first meeting – the sense of existential awe faded a long time ago. He scowls.

“I get four hours, five _at best_ , of sleep per day,” he says. “Would it kill you to choose a moment while I’m awake if you want to talk?”

“You’ve been busy,” the Outsider says. It’s difficult to know if he’s being sarcastic.

“That’s never stopped you before,” Daud points out, squinting blearily at him. “What do you want?”

“Am I not allowed to say hello to an old friend?

“Say that again with a straight face.”

“Ah, Daud. I almost regret our years of silence. Of all my Marked, you are one of the most surprising. The wonders never cease, do they?” The Outsider throws his head back, and _laughs_. “You’ve had many names over the years. Son of a witch. Outsider’s bastard. The adolescent assassin. The Knife of Dunwall. The murderer of the Empress. Aspiring vigneron. And now, the Royal Spymaster for Empress Emily Kaldwin herself. What a journey you have been on.”

“What,” Daud repeats, “do you _want_.”

“I must admit, out of all the possible futures and paths I saw you walk down, this was… not one of them. I do so enjoy watching history unfold before my eyes. But are you what you are today because of the debt you owe to the Empress, or because you care _far_ too much about what Corvo Attano thinks of you?”

 _My debt to Emily Kaldwin will never be repaid_ , he says to himself, once a day at least – a constant reminder to do better, to _be_ better, in his service to her. It’s been about that since the day the Outsider whispered the name Delilah and offered him a second chance, a way to redeem himself, to atone for Jessamine Kaldwin’s murder. Nothing will wash away the Empress’s blood from his hands but he can honour her memory and serve her daughter. Emily wasn’t the first or the only innocent young girl’s life he ruined, but it hers was the one that brought an Empire to his knees and the first he couldn’t justify the coin he received for it.

So yes, it’s about his debt to Emily Kaldwin. It’s never been _just_ about that, of course, but the Outsider is the first to suggest that Daud’s recent life choices aren’t just being dictated by his own newly-developed sense of justice, but rather by a desire for Corvo Attano’s – what? Approval? Respect? Trust?

 _Something_.

So what if he doesn’t mind Corvo standing too close as he picks his pocket, or likes it when he brushes his hand across the small of his back, or warms when the man smirks and grins and teases? Daud remembers Corvo’s burning gaze that day after reuniting him with Emily. Remembers Corvo searching his face for an answer to a question he hadn’t voiced, then finally finding it and just ever so slightly smiling. And he remembers that the ache that bloomed in his chest, the longing to protect and do right by Corvo Attano that overcame all sense and reason, and realises now that the feeling never went away – it just became a simple fact of his existence..

_My life is in your hands, Corvo Attano._

“Multiple choice questions usually have more than two options,” Daud finally replies. Or at the very least, an ‘all of the above’ option.

“My old friend,” the Outsider says, that mocking tone lilting in his voice. “Don’t tell me you’ve developed _feelings_ for him.”

 _Feelings_ implies something more powerful than the admiration and gratitude Daud acknowledges he more than holds for Corvo, but like hell he'd admit it to the manipulative bastard.

“No denial?” the Outsider says, tilting his head to the side. “That’s unlike you.”

"You're the one said not to tell you."

"Daud. How –”

“ _Don’t_ say fascinating.”

“– _interesting_.”

Daud restrains a groan of disgust.

“Corvo Attano has stolen many things over the years. I didn’t expect your heart to be one of those items. Could this be love, Daud?”

He’d loved his mother – she made every single day in Batista as a boy worth living just to see her rare smile and hear her seldom-told tales from the island off Pandyssia where she’d been born. He’d loved Billie and despite everything that happened, everything she did, he cannot bring himself to regret that love. He’d loved her the way Corvo loves Emily and thought she’d felt the same, that she’d _know_ he would have given her everything and she didn’t have to wait for that inevitable day where all apprentices see their chance to strike their teacher down and take their place. He’d loved her too much to ever take her life, so he gave it to her instead and told her that he forgave her. He loves his Whalers, the closest thing he has to a family since the Overseers in Serkonos took away his only known blood relative.

But that’s not the sort of love the Outsider is talking about.

Daud wouldn’t quite have phrased it that way himself. He wouldn’t have put it anyway at _all_ , and gone on quite happily _not thinking_ about it for the rest of his life. He’s pretty good at doing that, with only a few glaring exceptions on his track record.

The thing about admiration and gratitude is it’s far too easy for those emotions to mutate into infatuation, and then infatuation into desire, and then desire another feeling far more potent. He’s admittedly a couple of decades out of practice, but he doesn’t think it’s reached that final stage.

Yet.

This looks like it's going to be one of those glaring exceptions. “Don’t,” Daud snarls, face burning. “Don’t you _dare_ mock me –”

“If I wanted to mock you, Daud, I would ask if you truly expect him to return your feelings and if you’ve looked in a mirror recently.”

Oh, now that’s just fucking rude. “I have a great personality,” Daud sneers. “Piss off. If you’ve got nothing to say then you can leave me alone and bother your other ‘servant’ to stave off your boredom. This is none of your Void-damned business, is what it is, and I’m sick of being your –”

“When two of my Marked cross paths with each other, I expect only one to walk away. You and Corvo repeatedly defy my expectations. That makes it more than my business, and you’ll find that this where our interests once again align.” The Outsider’s tone no longer lilts with amusement. “I happen to be quite fond of Corvo Attano,” he continues. “Perhaps not as fond of him as _you_ seem to be –”

Daud scowls.

“– but enough that I’d rather not see him hung, drawn and quartered on heresy charges.”

“And you claim you don’t get involved,” Daud says. “I’d sooner die than let the Overseers lay a hand on him, you meddling black-eyed bast—”

He wakes in his bed with a jerk, his Mark searing like a bloodfly’s sting, drenched in cold sweat, and the Outsider’s laughter fading from his ears.

“— _bastard_ ,” he finishes with a swear. When he tries to go back to sleep his mind is too agitated and his body too tense, and all he can see when he closes his eyes is Corvo’s burning gaze.

* * *

**stuck deep in your vest**

“The City Watch can’t do anything unless there’s proof,” Thomas says. “I’m sorry, sir. The best they can do is stay on high alert during the commemoration.”

Daud grimaces.

He’d expected this of course. Without proof to corroborate the chatter he’s picked up about Overseer movements planned for the day of the commemoration, Curnow can’t launch any pre-emptive defence on the religious backbone of Dunwall’s society. Such an act would only serve the murmurs on the streets about Corvo, and the last thing Daud wants to do is doom the Empress and her Royal Protector straight into the hands of the people wanting to bring him down.

He has a few options left. The first, he could speak to the High Overseer and threaten him into confessing his involvement with the flyers and whatever the Overseers have planned for the day of the commemoration; the second, he could meet with Vice Overseer Jasper Catherick instead and play off the alleged rivalry between him and his superior.

The third – and he hopes it doesn’t come to this – involves being ready to kill in defence of Corvo and Emily should the Overseers act.

“Thank you, Thomas,” Daud sighs. “Have you heard from Rulfio?”

“Yeah, last night. He said that you gave him the boring job.”

Daud snorts. Good; boring means safe. “All right, I need to think about our next move. Whatever’s going on with the Overseers, it needs to be stopped before the commemoration.”

“I’ll make sure our men in the Watch are on high alert,” Thomas says. “Oh, and – another message from Attano, sir. He wants to talk to you.”

“Later,” Daud says, and Thomas nods and tranverses away.

* * *

It’s not that he doesn’t think he can kill to defend Corvo and Emily. Taking a life to protect another’s is different from taking a life for coin, or because he cannot control his fury. The problem is that he hasn’t made a steady shot with his wristbow, or been able to touch his blade, in two years. It’s not for lack of trying, but when the mere actions themselves cut his breath short and cold sweat breaks out on his forehead, the alternative becomes much easier to rely on. One of the benefits of the Outsider’s curses is his ability to freeze time and choke someone out from behind, and such an advantage can negate the need for any real skill with a blade or precision. But he always maintained his talents with a wristbow – until the day he took Jessamine Kaldwin’s life almost two years ago today.

There was a time, during his years as the Knife of Dunwall, that he could crouch on a rooftop, aim his wristbow and kill a man on his balcony from seven hundred meters away. A perfect shot, steady and true, the bolt striking his target through the base of his skull and killing him instantly. The steadiest hands in all of Serkonos, his mother called them.

Now he can’t even hit the middle of a target ten meters away.

He’s glad his mother didn’t live to see his hands like this. With a curse, Daud stomps over to the wall to yank the bolts out of the ruined wood.

Though Corvo Attano is capable of moving as silently as a rat – and in some cases, can actually _possess_ a rat to sneak through gaps in walls – Daud has attuned himself to hear the fain humming of the bone charms sewn into the pockets of his clothes when he approaches.

“Daud?” Corvo calls out through the door. “You there?”

How is it possible to both desire and dread someone’s presence? Daud steels himself and tries to forget the Outsider’s mocking taunts the night before. “You already know I am,” he says, positioning himself before the target as Corvo enters the room. “What do you need?”

“To talk.”

“I’m busy.”

“Busy ruining the wall, I see,” Corvo says, eyeing the holes spotting the wood. “I sent you three messages today and you ignored all of them. Are you avoiding me?”

“No,” Daud lies. “I’ve just been –”

“Busy? So you said.” Corvo squints at the target Daud hastily threw up on the wall. “You know, I’ve picked up a few of Sokolov’s portraits over the years. You could use one of the uglier ones as target practice instead.”

“You mean you _stole_ them over the years.” Daud narrows his eyes suspiciously. “Whose portraits?”

“…Portraits of people who are definitely not you.”

Oh, that asshole. “When I get my hands on that painting, Attano –”

“You’re not burning it, it’s worth three hundred coin.”

“But you don’t mind if I puncture it with bolts?”

“Well not _your_ one, obviously. It’ll hurt the resale value. I’ve got this really hideous one of Campbell that I’m happy to donate, though.”

Daud shakes his head. “Did you have any luck getting your assailant to talk?”

Corvo makes a noncommittal noise. “He was bribed, which we suspected. Paid relatively well to attempt to assassinate me during my audience with the High Overseer.”

Which can only mean his purpose was to provoke Corvo into revealing his powers before a fanatical religious leader. “Do we know who paid him?”

“No. He said he was contacted anonymously.”

Daud grunts. “Well at least we know for sure that someone is trying to get you brought down on heresy charges.”

“You still think it’s the Overseers?”

“How could it _not_ be?”

“You don’t have any firm proof yet.”

“I’ll find it.”

Corvo watches him reload his wristbow, aim, fire, and miss the target. The bolt strikes the wood with a resounding _thunk_.

“Tell me about the Brigmore Witches,” Corvo says suddenly, before Daud can stomp over to the wall and remove the bolt.

Daud stills. “Where did you hear about them?”

“Around.”

“Did you take one of my audiographs?” Daud accuses.

Corvo has the gall to look offended. “Now look, it’s just plain rude of you to keep assuming I steal your things.”

Daud raises an eyebrow.

“I mean, granted, yes, in _this_ instance,” Corvo admits after a beat, “but that’s beside the point. Who were they?”

“A symptom,” Daud says, “of a larger problem that was taken care.”

Corvo is silent for a moment. When he speaks, his tone is devoid of any levity. “A danger to Emily?”

Daud shakes his head. “No longer. Don’t dwell on it. It’s over.” He turns his back on Corvo so he doesn’t have to see that curious, burning gaze of his that makes his heart race, reloads his wristbow, aims, and fires.

Another miss.

“Damn it,” Daud mutters, staring at his trembling hands. He feels Corvo move closer behind him, and he clenches his fists together. “I’d… I’d hoped by now that they would’ve…”

He trails off.

“Y’know,” Corvo says, voice just a little too casual, “there was this kid I’d heard of around Batista when I was a boy in Karnaca.”

Daud freezes.

“I didn’t really know him. Only met him once. We were both street-rat kids, he was a bit older. He probably doesn’t remember now, since it was so long ago. He was showing off to everyone – he’d lined up bottles at the end of the street, more than two-hundred yards away, and he shot out each one with a crossbow he’d stolen from the City Watch.” Corvo raises his eyebrows. “He boasted that he had the steadiest hands in all of Serkonos.”

“He sounds like a wanker.”

Corvo laughs. “I was about eleven years old, I think, and I fell head-over-heels. Completely infatuated by the way the son of a witch could hold that weapon. I approached him after that display – all ten bottles, shattered – and I was so nervous I think it took me three tries to ask him how he did it.”

“Did he tell you?” Daud asks, voice wry.

There’s the faintest hint of a smile on Corvo’s mouth. “The boy smiled and handed me his crossbow,” he says, moving behind Daud now so that he is only a breath away. His Marked hand comes up to steady Daud’s through the leather glove, stilling the trembling with the slightest of touches as he guides Daud’s arm to aim. “Stood behind me, and showed me how to position myself.”

Corvo’s other hand touches his right shoulder, and it’s suddenly very difficult to breathe.

“Told me to relax, drop my shoulders,” he continues, and Daud lets Corvo guide his shoulders out of the vice he didn’t even realise they’d been locked in for the better part of a year. “Like that. Good.”

Daud closes his eyes, Corvo’s firm body aligned with his, and he’s now trembling for a very different reason. Corvo’ hand slides from Daud’s shoulder, down his back and snakes around his body, pressing gently against his ribcage.

“What the hell are you doing, Attano.”

When Corvo speaks, his lips are by Daud’s left ear and his breath warms his skin. “Shh,” Corvo murmurs. “He told me a secret about breathing. People think we suck in air to fill our lungs, that we have to make an effort to draw breath, but it’s not true. We breathe because our muscles attached to our rib cages contract, expanding our chests. He said something about negative pressure and generating airflow, or… whatever –”

“Eloquent,” Daud drawls.

“– the _point being_ ,” Corvo says, flexing his hand on Daud’s chest, “is that the process of breathing is automatic, and you’re trying too hard. So relax. And let it happen naturally.”

It’d be a lot easier to relax if every muscle in Daud’s body wasn’t pulled taut, aching with tension. The does the fucker _know_ what he’s doing to him? Is this some kind of _joke?_

“Aim…” Corvo murmurs, and Daud aims, Corvo’s hand steadying his. “Relax, and breathe.”

He breathes. Not the same ragged inhalations he’d gasped in, so long ago in the Chamber of Commerce, Rulfio’s hand on his back as he choked and wept and breathed air as though he’d forgotten its taste at knowing he was alive. This time when he breathes, he stops trying and just lets his body take over, chest guided by Corvo’s hand and air gently filling his lungs without effort.

“Hold,” Corvo instructs, “and fire on the exhale.”

He breathes out; the bolt cuts through the air, steady and true, and strikes the centre of the target with a _thunk_.

“That’s it,” Corvo murmurs. “You’ve still got it.”

Daud stares at the bolt in the middle of the target, which still quivers from the force with which it struck the wood.

Corvo's right hand falls from Daud’s chest, but he doesn’t move away; he just lets his hand settle gently at the small of his back instead, his Marked one still brushing Daud’s as they let their left hands fall. 

“If you’re only doing this to pick my pocket, both of us will be disappointed,” Daud murmurs. “I don’t have anything on me right now.”

“I know,” Corvo says, voice just a little too low and a little too husky that does nothing but stir something deep inside Daud. “But I’m not disappointed.”

Daud tilts his head to the side, until their faces are a hair’s breadth away. “Neither am I.”

Corvo looks as though he’s about to say something else, the intensity of his stare fading into something akin to self-doubt. Daud feels Corvo’s body tense, a precursor to stepping back and clearing his throat to make his excuses and leave.

The feelings that he’s been doing a sub-par job at keeping in check – thoughts that started treacherously infiltrating his every waking moment since the Outsider derisively asked him _don’t tell me you’ve developed_ feelings _for him_ – won’t go away, driving him to the brink of insanity and flooding through his veins like someone has set his blood alight. In the same second that Corvo’s hand falls away from his lower back, madness overcomes him, not wanting Corvo to leave and deny this thing that’s been building between them for the better part of a year. He turns against Corvo and catches him around the waist before he can step away, and has time to see his stunned expression – lips parted and eyes a reflection of the same thirst burning within Daud – before pulling their bodies together and pressing his mouth firmly against Corvo’s.

Corvo doesn’t react. He holds as still as a marble statue, and for one awful moment caught between two heartbeats Daud fears he’s misjudged _everything_ so very badly – but then Corvo starts to kiss back, tentative and slowly at first as though uncertain.

Then his hand fists in Daud’s hair and he groans against his mouth, kissing him now with fire in his blood and a hunger that’s been simmering between them for Void knows how long. Their mouths move fiercely together, all sense and reason wiped from Daud’s mind and replaced by the sweltering desire to be _closer_. Corvo groans again, the sound reverberating through Daud’s body and setting his nerve endings alight, as he allows Daud’s hand to move to the back of his neck and hold him against him.

He can’t _think_. He can’t think of anything except the feel of Corvo’s mouth against his, the firmness of their bodies pressed together. The aching longing in his chest bursts to life and floods every inch of him as admiration and gratitude give way to infatuation and infatuation to desire and desire into that last emotion he was so sure he hadn’t reached yet but he has, he _has_ , and it should frighten him that he allowed it to reach this point but it _doesn’t_ , it’s there now and he expresses it the only way he can, channelling it into their burning kiss. His life in Corvo Attano's hands.

Then Daud feels Corvo’s hands on his chest, abruptly shoving him away.

“No,” Corvo says, jerking back and breathing hard. “No, this isn’t – I won’t. No.”

…Oh.

“You’re the one who started it,” Daud hears himself say, lips numb and body limp.

Corvo – thankfully – doesn’t seem to register Daud’s poor attempt at levity. He backs away, throwing up his arms and shaking his head. “Are you _insane?_ ” he blurts out, sounding half hysterical as he gestures at the distance between them now. “We can’t – _this_ can’t happen. I could never – not with you. You! Of all people! You’re the one who _killed_ her! I can’t –”

The moment Corvo says this his face crumbles, eyes stricken with grief. Dead eyes, Daud thinks. Haunted, dead eyes, remembering watching the woman he loved murdered two years ago tomorrow by the very man he’s just betrayed her with. A man he may have come to tolerate, even perhaps like on occasion, but will never – _never_ – forgive.

Daud closes his eyes, feeling the cold Void tear at his chest. He needs to explain himself. Apologise, admit that it was a mistake, that it was his fault, he’d misread the situation – anything to spare Corvo from his agony.

“Corvo, I –” Daud starts to say.

“No, don’t,” Corvo snaps, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Don’t talk. Don’t say _anything_. I need to – I just need to _think_.” He breathes out hard and backs away. “Don’t – don’t follow me.”

“Corvo, wait –”

Corvo Blinks away, and Daud is left alone.

Somewhere, he thinks bitterly, the Outsider must be laughing at him.

* * *

**we shall not fall**

At the age of fifteen, Daud fell badly twice – once off a rooftop, and once in love. Both falls hurt in equal amounts; the first because he’d smashed into the cobbled streets of Karnaca meters below and broke three ribs and shattered his left leg, and the second because the girl he fell in love with was killed on her first major mission for the man who’d kidnapped them both.

There’s a certain kind of pain that comes hand in hand with love. The rage that drove him to insanity upon seeing his mother’s body; the grief that rendered him confined to a filthy sleeping bag when he learned it was his broken leg that stopped him from going with his partner on the mission that would result in her death. The feeling of a knife driven between his shoulder blades and the helpless despair gripping his mind and body as Billie knelt before him and offered her life in repayment for the betrayal.

All of that and more should have taught him by now what love does to a person. He grasps his hands together and can’t forget the way Corvo dredged up a long-forgotten childhood encounter and guided his aim and murmured into his ear; he closes his eyes and sees Corvo’s stricken eyes, his horrified expression. It’s a surprise that the Outsider doesn’t show up to drag him into the Void for the sole purpose of making some assholish quip about how pathetic he is right now.

Void knows he deserves it. He’s always found the term ‘broken heart’ a mildly ridiculous one, but now he wonders how people don’t just up and die from this feeling.

The Arcane Bond alerts Daud to Thomas’s presence, but he doesn’t acknowledge him when he strides across the room to where Daud is pressing his head against the wall with his eyes closed.

“Uh… sir?” Thomas asks tentatively from behind him. “Are you all right? Did something happen?”

He’s probably worried Daud is on the verge of another existential breakdown, and poor Thomas doesn’t even have Rinaldo and Rulfio handy to help buffer it.

Daud tries to think of a way to delicately phrase ‘I sexually accosted Corvo Attano on the eve of the second anniversary of Jessamine Kaldwin’s death at my hands and now he hates me’, but he’s never been much of a wordsmith. The urge to leave this city and fade from the memories of everyone who lives here is overwhelming. He could do it. Easily. Just vanish tonight – pack a small back and jump on the next ship to Serkonos, and leave his name and his pain behind.

It’d be _too_ easy. And he’s spent too many years of his life running away from the consequences of his actions.

“Just… made a fool out of myself more than usual, Thomas,” he understates instead, grimacing and pushing himself of the wall. “Don’t worry about it. What is it?”

Thomas doesn’t look convinced, but he lets it slide for now. “This is going to sound strange, sir, but… Vice Overseer Jasper Catherick somehow got in touch with us. He wants to meet you. Tonight.”

Daud narrows his eyes. “Does he, now.”

“It might be a trap, sir.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Daud replies.

The ache in his chest hangs heavy like cold vice around his heart. Daud breathes in – without trying, allowing the air to gently fill his lungs as he imagines Corvo’s hand flexing on his ribcage – and he makes a decision.

Corvo may never want to speak to him again – but Daud is still Emily Kaldwin’s Spymaster, and her father is in danger.

“Shadow me, stay out of sight,” Daud instructs Thomas. “If I’m gone for more than two hours, alert Attano. I think it’s time to meet the Overseers.”

* * *

His mother warned him to never make an enemy out of a witch, but it was her death at the hands of the Overseers that warned him to the dangers of even crossing paths with the men of the religious order. Witches don’t bother you unless you bother them first; Overseers can turn up any time for any reason and commit whatever crimes they please in the name of purifying the city and upholding the Strictures, and they have the weight of their own law behind them.

No one cared when his mother was beaten and stomped to death in their small house in Batista by the Overseers – not the Watch, not the Oracular Order, not the Duke and his court, not the neighbours, not the miners. Even the man who kidnapped him off the streets and put a blade in his hand thanked the Overseers that there was no one left for Daud to call family. There was no one Daud could go to for justice because there _was_ no legal course of justice to enact, so he did it himself with his own two bare, calloused, steady hands, squeezing an Overseer’s neck until his eyes bulged and his face turned purple.

Very rarely in the past he’d accepted contracts from Overseers if the coin was good and Daud ensured it wasn’t a trap to lead the might of the Abbey upon wherever his base was at the time. The contracts were far and few in between and he only dealt with lower-tier Overseers; anyone higher up the food chain was bound to cause problems sooner or later and put his Whalers in mortal danger. His strange deadly dance with the witch Delilah from afar was fair game until the moment she seduced Billie and turned his second against him to bring the Overseers’ wrath down upon the Chamber of Commerce, slaughtering his men and paralysing them to the spot with the ancient music boxes that burn their bones and feels like a thousand whiplashes at once across the body.

Witches he can handle. Witches are simple, reliant upon their powers with little to no strategy and (usually) only get dangerous when you make an enemy out of them first. But the mere existence of Overseers is _always_ bad news. If not today, then tomorrow, and if not tomorrow then the day after that, and so on and so forth until you’re crushed on the ground and coughing blood while they stomp you with their boots and call you a heretic for doing nothing more than looking at them the wrong way or being found with a counterfeit bonecharm. Trusting an Overseer is like trusting the Outsider: it’s a bad idea, _especially_ if the Vice Overseer himself invites a wanted man and rumoured heretic to their office for a midnight chat.

Vice Overseer Jasper Catherick is not the youngest person to ever reach the rank of Vice Overseer, but he is the first Vice Overseer to hold open disdain for his direct superior to _not_ have found himself on the wrong end of the Heretic’s Brand.

Delilah was powerful. Jasper Catherick is _clever_ , and Daud will take powerful over clever any day.

He watches Jasper Catherick’s office in Holger Square for half an hour, ensuring the Vice Overseer is alone and unarmed. There are no music boxes around, no alarms, no walls of light, just a man alone in his office. Tonight the Vice Overseer has shed his mask and sits at his desk, sipping a glass of red wine as he reads reports under a light that flickers ever so slightly. The tank of whale oil will need to be changed soon. In between one flicker of light and the next, Daud transverses in through the open window, appearing before the Overseer.

Jasper Catherick blinks and looks up at his guest. “Daud,” he greets, unconcerned with the fact that a man has appeared out of thin air to stand before him.

“You summoned me,” Daud says.

“Yes,” Jasper Catherick says, standing. He extends his hand over the desk; Daud ignores it, firstly because like hell he’ll let an Overseer see his hands shake, and secondly, like hell he’ll ever shake the hand of an Overseer. “Thank you responding in such a timely manner, though perhaps next time you might use the front door?”

Daud thinks not. “Why am I here?”

Catherick does not seem taken aback by his bluntness. He lowers his hand and shuffles some papers on his desk. “I’ve been following your movements this week,” he says. “I suspected you were going to pay me a visit at some point; I thought it best to make it an official invitation. Avoid any unpleasantness, so on and so forth.”

Daud squints around the office, grasping the Void and using it to cast the world in shades of dark blue to see outlines of people who may be hiding, or listening through the walls. “Where’s the High Overseer?” he asks, suspicious.

“He’s in a meeting with the High Oracle.”

“It’s midnight.”

Jasper smiles. “It’s a _private_ meeting.”

“I thought you lot were above such base desires,” Daud says. “Isn’t that a violation of one of your precious Strictures?”

“At least three,” the Vice Overseer agrees, and gestures to a teapot and set on his desk. “Tea?”

“No.”

“Wine, perhaps.”

Daud _would_ like wine, and a lot of it, but not in the company of an Overseer and least of all from a bottle pulled from his desk drawer. “No,” he says again, and cautiously takes the seat that Jasper gestures to. “You don’t seem all that concerned with the High Overseer’s nightly activities.”

“Not concerned, just disappointed."

“So am I. The Overseers are planning something for the commemoration, and I’d like to know what it is and how to stop it. _Without_ that unpleasantness you’re so keen to avoid.”

“My, but you are quite the court’s outsider, aren’t you?” Catherick says. “Very straightforward. No wonder the Empress keeps you around. It’s almost refreshing to not have to play the games of politics.”

“Then get,” Daud bites out, “to the point.”

Jasper Catherick smiles and stands up from behind his desk to pace his office. “High Overseer Gerard Magnus is a pious man,” he says. “He prostrates himself before the Strictures at least three times a day, and he believes himself to be the perfect embodiment of all that they stand for.”

This, Daud thinks, is him getting to the point?

“This is of course untrue,” the Vice Overseer continues, “but in my opinion, man has never worshipped anything but the ideal of himself. Overseers are just men, and men are human. Humans can be unpleasant creatures when in pursuit of more power. Power in this case is embodied in Emily Kaldwin. Quite a burden to bear for a twelve-year-old girl. Not everyone is happy that her Lord Protector takes his duties so seriously that he will not allow others to… alleviate her of this burden.”

“The Overseers are planning to deploy tomorrow under his instruction to disrupt the commemoration,” Daud guesses. “They intend to publicly arrest Corvo Attano on heresy charges. Destroy his reputation, take away the only person Emily trusts so they can turn her into their religious figurehead.”

“Ah, good, you did work it out.”

Daud frowns. “You admitted that easily. What’s to stop me from going to the City Watch and Royal Guard with this information and bringing their force down on Holger Square?”

Catherick laughs. “Who will the City Watch believe? The Blunted Knife of Dunwall, or the High Overseer himself? And even if they _did_ believe you, all it will look like is Corvo Attano attacking the only institution capable of saving Dunwall from his witchcraft.”

This was the same fear Daud had – the same thing Corvo warned. He needs proof; solid, tangible proof to clear Corvo’s name and save both him and his daughter from a religious nutjob. “I won’t let this go ahead,” Daud warns.

“You’re just one man, Daud. There are hundreds ready to enact the High Overseer’s plan come daybreak. How many men can Corvo Attano hold off, even with your aid? Ten? Twenty? Two hundred?”

Why is he telling Daud all of this? To _mock_ him? Because he _knows_ about Daud’s debt to Emily Kaldwin and the oath he swore to protect Corvo Attano, because he thinks it’s funny to indirectly threaten Corvo’s life while knowing there’s nothing Daud can do about it, because –

_Oh._

“You’re telling me this because _you_ can stop the deployment,” Daud realises.

“Yes,” Vice Overseer Catherick agrees, “I can.”

There’s a long pause. “ _Will_ you?” Daud asks, exasperated.

“That depends,” Catherick replies, “on what you offer me in return. What I _want_ , Daud, is a reassurance of… _indirect_ support for my election during the Feast of Painted Kettles.” He lifts his hands to placate Daud’s inevitable objections. “Yes, yes, I know what you’re going to say – the throne cannot interfere in matters of the Abbey.”

“In theory,” Daud bites out.

“In theory,” Catherick agrees. “Unlike my rivals, I have no ambitions to speak directly into the Empress’s ear and I don’t particularly care about Attano’s strange abilities or how many Strictures he violates behind closed doors. The only evils in this world are those that have come from the desires of men and women, not the influence of some mysterious Void-dwelling leviathan. My only concern is that of the Abbey and its integrity. Do you understand?”

This could all just be one tremendous bluff; complete and utter lies intended to trick Daud into complacency so that they end up trading one corrupt High Overseer for another, far smarter one. Jasper Catherick could be lying through his teeth about his intentions towards Emily. Perhaps all he needs is Magnus out of the way to weasel his own way into Emily’s inner circle.

But it’s not as though Daud many options at his disposal just at the moment. If nothing else, at least he’ll _know_ Jasper Catherick’s potential – and Corvo will be alive to protect Emily a little longer.

“I’ll encourage Corvo to lend his support to your election,” Daud finally says, as though chewing on rocks. Of course, this is also dependent on whether Corvo ever wants to speak to Daud again – but Jasper Catherick doesn’t need to know about that part.

Catherick nods, satisfied. “Thank you,” he says. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some… tactical readjustments to make to Magnus’s plans.” He smiles, and holds out his hand once more. “I look forward to working with you again, Knife of Dunwall.”

Daud does not return the sentiment, and stands without returning the shake.

The Vice Overseer – soon to be High Overseer – chuckles, and lowers his hand. “Feel free to use the door this time.”

“I’m the uncivilised sort,” Daud sneers. “The window suits me fine.”

He is about to turn and Blink back out across to the rooftop he came from, but before he does a small, bound booklet catches his eye, one of the papers Catherick had shuffled earlier. He picks it up off Catherick’s desk, tracing his calloused fingers across the sturdy, fine-quality paper. It’s an article about a period of turmoil during the time of Emperor Euhorn Jacob Kaldwin I and his relationship with the Abbey of the Everyman. The title – _Emperor Euhorn and the Abbey: a study of symbiosis_ – is flourished across the front cover in rich emerald ink.

“This publication,” Daud says. “Where is it from?”

Jasper Catherick glances up at it. “Oh, those. Our Sisters in the Oracular Order print and distribute essays for us to read. Those works are intended for high-ranking Overseers only.”

Daud’s blood runs cold. “Magnus didn’t come up with that plan on his own, did he?”

“I’ll be impressed if he did,” Catherick says. “He hardly strikes me as smart enough to coordinate something like this, but I’ve seen stranger things in this world –”

He stops hearing the words and tugs _hard_ on the Arcane Bond, calling Rulfio with his heart pounding and his throat as dry as sand –

And hears nothing in response.

* * *

When Emily Kaldwin assumed power, it was by her order that the music boxes carried around by the Overseers during the time of the plague were to be discontinued and sent to storage, a decision most people wouldn’t believe she had come to on her own unless it was whispered to her by a heretical influencer.

Daud hasn’t seen one of those boxes in more than a year now, but the sound of it – the way its discordant sound waves vibrate through the air and chatter his teeth and make his tongue taste like copper – is something he will never forget so long as he shall live.

He’d been lucky when the Overseers stormed the Flooded District. Though vastly outnumbered he still had the element of surprise, and could stay out of the ranges of the boxes that brought his men to their knees, paralysed and at the mercy of fanatics who executed those who did not submit. He’d slipped around them from behind and tossed canisters of choke dust at them, giving time for his captured Whalers to escape – Kieron and Jenkins, Misha and Galia – so they could turn the tide and reclaim the base.

The moment he arrives at the office of High Oracle Odessa White, all those memories flood back when he tastes copper on his tongue and feels his teeth chatter. It’s not like it was in the Flooded District; it’s not contained and directed in one area, it vibrates _everywhere_ – through the air, through his body, restricting the Void and cutting him off from his powers, but not so intensely yet that it starts bruising his skin and strangling the air from his lungs.

Without the powers of the Void he cannot peer through the walls to spot hidden adversaries; he cannot locate any other music boxes that may be strategically placed around Odessa White’s office. All he can see through the window is Rulfio on his knees, hands bound behind his back, shuddering as he’s caught in the corrosive vibrations of the music that fills the room like a parody of the ambient audiograph melodies in nobles’ houses.

There’s a chance Rulfio is alone. There’s an even larger chance that this is a trap, but Daud doesn’t leave men behind. Not when they fell to Attano’s defensive attacks on the gazebo two years ago, not when the Overseers stormed the Flooded District and captured them, and not Rulfio who was never meant to be in this position.

He slips into the room, staggering under the weight of the ancient music. Rulfio doesn’t notice him approach until his hands – shaking harder than ever now – grasp him by the shoulder. Rulfio starts, groaning and shaking his head as though to clear it of the fog.

“Hang on, Rulfio,” Daud grits out, teeth vibrating from the waves of disruptive music. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

“S-sir,” Rulfio gasps, “no, y-you – it’s a –”

He hears the familiar _twang_ of a crossbow a split second before pain flares at the back of his knee. He swears and stares down at his leg, seeing the head of a crossbow jutting out through the fabric of his pants, blood beginning to spread. He spins, ignoring the agony ripping through his leg and draws his sword, but the combination of pain and the music paralysing his every nerve and muscle makes his movement sluggish and before he can defend himself the heavy end of a pistol smashes across the side of his face, sending him to the ground.

He sees red for a few, awful seconds where he can’t move anything in his body. When the blur in his vision fades, accustoming to the music waves, his eyes focus and he sees a tall, elegant woman pacing before him.

“How nice of you to join us, Knife of Dunwall,” Odessa White, High Oracle of the Oracular Order, says. “Unexpected, but I’m glad you’re here. I hope you weren’t intending to alert the Lord Protector. We already caught your agent snooping around.”

Daud groans, clutching his knee where the bolt protrudes from his flesh.

“You were right,” Gerard Magnus’s voice says from behind Daud. He steps into view, clipping his crossbow to his belt as he makes his way over to Odessa White. “Attano _is_ a heretic. He caught that bolt straight out of the air, just like you said he would. My Overseers are ready to move against him once the ceremony is underway come morning.”

“Excellent,” the High Oracle says. “Together, you and I will restore order to this Empire and guide young Emily along the path of righteousness without the influence of witches and heretics. Nothing –” she turns her sneering gaze towards Daud, “– shall stand in our way.”

“Sir,” Rulfio chokes out, through the battering of the music. “Sir – I’m sorry, I tried to –”

Odessa White glances at him on her way out. “Leave no witnesses,” she orders with a flick of her hand, and closes the door behind her.

Daud hauls himself to his uninjured knee with a snarl of pain, but he’s too far, too slow, too _fucking helpless_ to stop Magnus as he advances upon Rulfio and plunges his blade through his chest, twists it sharply, and yanks it back out again.

He doesn’t know if it’s the grating waves of the ancient music that fills his ears with an incoherent roar, or the sound of his own heart screaming as Rulfio grunts and falls to the floor, jerking as blood pools under his body, staining the carpets. Daud finds himself on his hands and knees, dragging himself over to Rulfio – deaf and blind to everything else in the room as the music plunders him into submission – and grasping the younger man’s shoulders.

“Rulfio,” he gasps, turning him over, his trembling fingers pulling the Whaler’s mask from his face.

Rulfio stares up at him with terrified blue eyes, blinking rapidly as the blood gushes from his chest. His mouth moves silently, trying to form words, blood trickling from the corner of his lips – then his eyes fade and his body stills.

“R—” Daud chokes, clutching Rulfio closer to him, but his throat is too tight and he can’t breathe and Rulfio doesn’t move at all.

“Heathens like you are better dead than alive,” Gerard Magnus says from behind him. Daud turns his head and catches sight of the High Overseer wiping his blade clean of Rulfio’s blood. “Don’t worry, witch. You’ll be joining your friend soon.”

The thing about blind fury is that it’s all-consuming; it turns men into monsters, strips them of control and reverts them to their base desires. It allows a fourteen-year-old boy to tackle a grown man to the ground; it allows him now, with a hardbolt through his knee and his body being battered by the Overseers’ music, to lunge at Gerard Magnus, smashing them both to the floor and flinging his blade off into a dark corner of the office.

Holding someone in a Tyvian chokehold is different from strangling a person to death. A chokehold is quiet and swift, a quick cut-off of blood to the head that renders a person immobilised and unconscious in a matter of seconds, unable to fight back. Though relatively gentle, it’s an imperfect non-lethal method; sometimes people don’t wake up afterwards, or when they do wake there’s a chance their mind will be addled, but it’s an acceptable alternative if one has run out of sleep darts.

Wrapping your hands around a person’s neck and squeezing is _violent_.

High Overseer Gerard Magnus thrashes in Daud’s grip, his fingernails scraping down Daud’s face and tearing the skin there as he struggles and gurgles, his face turning red.

“But – the music –” Magnus wheezes out, eyes wild with panic.

“I was a killer long before I was a heretic,” Daud snarls, and grips tighter. Strong, calloused hands – hands like marble – squeezing and squeezing and squeezing while the man below him writhes, dying slowly in Daud’s hands the way all Overseers deserve to die, slowly and _painfully_.

He distantly realises the music has stopped; the waves of paralysing sound fading from the office, but all it does is make him feel stronger, make him squeeze tighter so that he can _kill_ –

“Daud! Daud, stop! We need him alive!”

His cheeks are damp and his eyes are burning so badly he can hardly see Magnus’s dying face, but he doesn’t stop. He won’t stop. It’s not enough. Rulfio is dead and it’s Daud’s fault, it’s his fault, Rulfio is dead, he’s _dead_ and he _isn’t coming back and it’s his fault_ –

“Daud,” Corvo murmurs, his hands on Daud’s shoulders, “enough. This isn’t you. Not anymore.”

… _Corvo?_

“He killed –” Daud chokes out, and Corvo’s hand grips his shoulder.

“I know,” he murmurs. “But you have to stop.”

Gerard Magnus’s face is almost purple and his eyes are bloodshot but he’s still alive, only just. It’d be so easy to just keep holding his throat until the man dies like the dog he is, but Corvo murmurs his name again and Daud releases the Overseer’s neck with a yell, slamming his head against the floor and staggering away. He puts weight on the knee with a bolt through it and pitches to the floor with a cry of agony, tearing off his leather gloves stained with Rulfio's blood to stare at his hands.

They're as still as a frozen lake.

He closes his eyes and clenches his fists together. Behind him, he can hear Corvo restraining the High Overseer and directing members of the Watch to find Odessa White, but he doesn’t care about any of that. He crawls up beside Rulfio’s body, ignoring everything else, and he cradles Rulfio's face and presses his forehead gently against his.

He is already cold to the touch.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers hoarsely, breathing hard. _Just breathe, sir_. “I – I’m so sorry.”

“Daud…” Corvo says from behind him.

Daud lifts Rulfio’s body into his arms, supporting his weight on his uninjured leg, and faces Corvo’s devastated gaze. Daud can’t bear to meet it. He clenches his eyes shut and shifts his weight, ignoring his bleeding leg as he holds Rulfio tightly against him as if pressing him to his heart will restart Rulfio's.

“Daud –” Corvo says again, hand outreached, but Daud transverses out of the office, staggering away into the night.

* * *

**honour for all**

Fifty-thousand people flood the streets to remember the late Jessamine Kaldwin, two years after her death at the hands of an assassin.

Only fifteen gather in the palace morgue to mourn a young man who worked for the Empress's assassin.

The Whalers – such as they are now, dispersed across Gristol and the Empire with new lives and new identities – convene once more, wearing their old uniform and mask as they used to as they stand vigil around their fallen brother. While Jenkins makes a trembling speech – one of the best of us, Jenkins calls Rulfio – Thomas doesn’t say a word, stoic and withdrawn. Thomas will cry later, Daud thinks, when the others can’t see or hear. Kieron and Aedan stand side by side, hands clasped before them, and Devon and Anthony slouch down in the corners of the room, their grief like anchors around their necks.

Like many of them, Rulfio had no surname – none he wanted to use when Daud brought him into the fold of his Whalers – but family names meant very little to orphans and street rats in this wretched city when they had each other.

Rinaldo openly weeps as he works on Daud’s knee, removing the bolt and sterilising the wound to prevent infection from setting in. It hurts, Daud thinks, but not enough to drown out the pain of looking at Rulfio’s still form on that cold metal slab he’s been laid to rest on. The damage is probably permanent – the head of the bolt tore through his ligaments and he’ll walk with a limp after this, maybe for the rest of his life. Rinaldo works silently, tears streaming down his face, his hands steady as he stitches the wound with consummate skill taught to him by Anton Sokolov. When the final bandage is applied and Daud downs a vial of S&J Health Elixir, Rinaldo can hold himself together no longer and chokes, his shoulders jerking in time with his gasping sobs as he leans against Daud.

Daud can do nothing but hold him steady.

“Just breathe,” he murmurs, gripping Rinaldo’s shoulders as he weeps, gasping for air. “Just breathe.”

Hours later after his men have left, Thomas helps Daud to his feet, supporting his weight as he grimaces with the pain.

“Burial arrangements will need to be made, sir,” Thomas says, voice hoarse and rough as he speaks for the first time since Daud staggered home carrying Rulfio’s body in his arms.

“I’ll take care of it,” Daud murmurs, limping along with Thomas’s help to return to his office in the attic of the tower. The commemoration will be over by now, he thinks.

“He never told us his surname.”

No one deserves to be buried without a family name. Daud can’t bear to look at Rulfio’s body as they leave the morgue, hidden away under a white sheet, so still and quiet and so _alone_.

“I’ll give him mine,” Daud says quietly, closing his eyes. He’s sure his mother won’t mind sharing it.

Thomas starts, surprised perhaps, and then Daud hears him choke a little behind his mask. “Thank you, sir,” he says, voice strained, and leaves as soon as he’s helped Daud to his bed, unable to hold himself together any longer.

Neither can Daud.

* * *

He receives a letter of condolence from Jasper Catherick, and various notes from the Whalers who can’t return to Dunwall to attend Rulfio’s vigil. Thomas keeps himself sparse, dealing with his grief in his own way.

Corvo doesn’t come to see him, but then, Daud doesn’t really expect him to.

Four days after Rulfio’s death, Empress Emily Kaldwin pays him a visit.

“Empress,” Daud greets, faintly surprised after she knocks on the door of his office and deftly enters without waiting for his assent. In the one and a half years of his service to her, not once has the young Empress ever deigned to step into his office. Emily doesn’t come to him – he goes to _her_. That’s the rule. She summons him; he obeys. But she enters now and stands before him where he rests on his bed, his injured leg stretched out and his eyes red and splotchy.

She doesn’t comment on either fact of his physical state.

“I thought you’d like to know that the commemoration went smoothly,” she says.

“I heard,” Daud replies.

“Your man. The one who fell to the High Overseer. What was his name?”

He didn’t think the loss of one of his men would be of concern to her. He finds himself unexpectedly moved by this.

“Rulfio,” he tells her hoarsely. “His name is – his name was Rulfio. He was only twenty-three years old. I found him about a decade ago, fighting off a bunch of Bottle Street Gang members over a tin of whale meat like an idiot. Scrawny little brat. I took him in, trained him.”

Emily listens in silence.

“But he, uh – he wasn’t… like me. He was _good_. He didn’t come with me on that day. He – I, uh – just –” He closes his eyes, his throat tightening, and bows his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Just… give me a moment,” he whispers. “Please.”

She does.

_Just breathe, sir._

For the barest of seconds he thinks he can feel Rulfio’s hand on his back, murmuring quietly and helping him breathe. So he breathes – in and out, in and out – so he won’t start weeping before the Empress.

Time passes, and Emily waits.

“He deserved better,” Daud finally says.

“I’m sorry for his loss.”

He nods, thankful, and lifts his head to meet her gaze of steel. “What will you do with the High Oracle and High Overseer?” he asks.

Emily tilts her jaw up. “They will both be publicly executed for treason,” she says, and Daud must quell an instinctual surge of bitter delight rising in him at the thought of seeing Odessa White and Gerard Magnus dangling at the ends of two long ropes. “Corvo suggested that Magnus be given the Heretic’s Brand, but Vice Overseer Catherick has been very supportive of my decision. He’s leading an enquiry into the Oracular Order.”

Yeah, he bets Jasper Catherick has been ‘very supportive’ of Emily.

Once you start ordering people killed to get your way, everything else is mere detail. Daud finds himself remembering that day on Kingsparrow Island, the rain pelting down over the soldiers standing off in defense of Havelock and Martin and Pendleton, driven mad by guilt for their crimes. He thinks of himself, leaning over an audiograph in a crumbled, rotted building, reciting the words he thought would be his last, so sure he was ready to face death. _I’ve learned that our choices always matter to someone, somewhere_ , he’d said. It took him forty-odd years to learn that the consequences of those choices always come back around.

He wonders how long it will take Emily.

“Execution, huh,” he says. “I have trouble believing Corvo would just agree to that.”

“Corvo isn’t the Empress,” Emily says sharply, and Daud doesn’t need to ask for details to know that she fought with her father bitterly about this. And won. “Those who would cross me the wrong way and threaten the stability of my rule _will_ know the consequences.”

Corvo Attano watched the woman he loved and was duty-sworn to protect murdered before his eyes, saw his daughter kidnapped, then spent six months being tortured in a prison for crimes he did not commit. And instead of emerging from that and killing all those who had wronged in him, he found alternatives, and so didn’t spill a single drop of blood.

It wasn’t out of mercy that he did this, Daud has since learned. He ruined their lives and got them out of the way because it made him _better_ than the men who ordered the Empress’s death. It made him _better_ than the Loyalists who broke him out of that hellhole and tried to mold him into their personal assassin. It makes him the best man Daud thinks he’s ever had the honour of knowing; a man of integrity, a man so remarkable that he didn’t even take the chance to slit the throat of the assassin who drove a blade through the Empress’s chest.

A man so good and so fucking _decent_ that he wouldn’t even let Daud squeeze the life out of the Overseer who murdered Rulfio when Daud had every Void-damned right.

 _This isn’t you,_ Corvo said. _Not anymore_.

Daud thinks of his hands, now so still after two years of constant trembling. The hands of a killer, a murderer, whose regret finally caught up with him after so many years only to see him fall right back into the same old pattern that started it all, and he isn’t so sure that Corvo is correct.

But he wants to at least _try_ to be the man Corvo thinks he can be, even if Corvo never wants anything to do with him again.

Daud will not sit back and watch as the daughter of the man he loves marches down the road he started her on. He won’t stand idly by and see Corvo Attano’s heart break as the steel in Emily’s eyes erases all traces of Jessamine Kaldwin in her features and manner and hardens her heart. Corvo lost the woman he loved to Daud’s blade; he won’t let him lose his daughter to the monster she shares with her mother’s killer as well.

“I was fourteen when I came home and found my mother beaten to death by the Overseers,” he tells her. “Five of them. Hardly seems like a fair fight, does it? But she held her own – took four of them down with her. There was only one left standing when I arrived. She was – she was everything I had and I was _so angry_. I barely even remember killing him. Strangled him to death. He was the first person I ever killed, and then after that I just – couldn’t stop.” Daud stares down at his hands, the black Mark seared into his skin on the back of his left hand. “No one should have to watch their mother die before their eyes,” he murmurs. “It – changes them.”

Emily is silent for a long time, processing he words. “I wanted to kill you,” she finally says quietly.

“I know. I even put a gun in your hands.”

“I’m _not_ giving the gun back, if that’s what you’re planning on asking.”

Despite everything that’s happened, he still finds it in him to offer her a very small smile. “Has anyone ever told you you’re quite charming, Your Imperial Majesty?”

For the first time since he’s known her, she returns his smile. “On occasion.”

“You can keep the gun. I’m sure Corvo can teach you how to use it, if that’s what you want. But people like us –”

“I am _nothing_ like you –”

“– people like _us_ ,” Daud repeats, stronger this time, “burn hot, then burn up. Killing is… easy once you start. Until the day it isn’t.”

She may be the Empress, but she’s also a twelve-year-old girl. Emily fumes, looking like a child on the verge of an ugly tantrum. “If you’re questioning my decision and telling me not to have those traitors executed –”

“I’m not _telling_ you to do anything, Empress,” Daud says. “All I’m saying is, if I’d been in charge of an Empire as a teenager after watching my mother die… I’d have ordered an execution too.”

And if Corvo hadn’t been there to stop him that night… well. Daud knows exactly how far he’d have gone.

She tears her eyes of steel away from his face, cold and silent once more for painfully long time, a curl of disgust on her mouth.

“I will never forgive you, you know,” Emily finally says.

“I know,” Daud replies. “I was never after forgiveness from you, or Corvo. That’s not why I –”

“I am aware of your reasoning, and your guilt complex doesn’t interest me, Daud.” She closes her eyes for a second and takes a deep breath, as though to brace for what she forces herself to say next, sounding as though she is being force-fed shards of glass. “But I… I _am_ grateful you saved Corvo. Again. And as far as I’m concerned, your debt to us has been repaid.”

He frowns.

“I free you from my service, Knife of Dunwall,” Emily says. “You may do with your life as you please.”

Heh. Cullero waits for him on the horizon, then. “Is that your way of telling me to piss off out of Dunwall and never return?”

She seems to struggle with herself. “It’ll be a shame if I have to go through the trouble finding a new Spymaster when the one I have is adequate,” she eventually says, which Daud thinks is the closest she’ll ever come to admitting she would like him to stay.

She stands to leave, brushing invisible creases from her jacket. “I won’t execute the traitors,” she states, as though that had been her intention all along. “But neither of them will _ever_ see the light of day again.”

He can live with that. He manages another small smile, and bows his head. “Empress.”

“Spymaster Daud,” she replies, and because she cannot dismiss him with a flick of her hand, she turns sharply on her heel and strides out of his room.

He watches her leave, and as always, he cannot tell whether it is despair he feels, or admiration.

* * *

It’s seven days after Rulfio’s death and the late Jessamine Kaldwin’s commemoration service. Corvo doesn’t come to see him, which Daud supposes is for the best. He receives a letter of sorrow from Billie, which he folds and tucks into the pocket beside his heart but doesn’t reply to.

Rulfio’s funeral is a quiet, sombre affair – a small ceremony late one afternoon in a far-flung corner of Dunwall where fallen Whalers are laid to rest. His tombstone is marked by his given name and the family name that belonged to him the moment Daud brought him into the fold.

Rinaldo crafts a crutch for Daud to make use of until his leg heals, but a limp is looking more and more likely to be a permanent feature of his gait. It will get better, in time, if he does all the therapy exercises Rinaldo instructs of him. He leans his weight against the crutch during the funeral, allowing Thomas to help him balance when it is his turn to lift a shovel of dirt into the grave. There’s so much to say, and yet nothing he can say at all that will do Rulfio justice and nothing he can say that they don’t all already know.

“I’m sorry I failed you,” Daud murmurs. He trails his fingers across the tombstone. _Just breathe_. “Goodbye, Rulfio.”

When the moon is high and the city falls silent, Thomas helps him return to the Tower, slipping back in unseen.

“Is there anything else you need, sir?” Thomas asks, voice hoarse.

Daud shakes his head. “No. Thank you, Thomas. For everything.”

“It’s my honour, sir.”

Thomas leaves. The night drags on and Daud cannot sleep, the ache in his chest too sore and the pain in his wounded leg too strong to allow unconsciousness to consume him and spare him the agony of being awake. He sits at his desk instead, reading _Ports of Call_ by candlelight, until the first light of day shines in through the windows. With a yawn he sets the book aside and rubs his eyes, starting slightly when a knock comes at his door. The Void allows him to see Corvo’s figure through the door.

“Come in,” he calls out hoarsely.

Corvo enters, approaching slowly. “You’re back,” he says, and it must be Daud’s imagination that he hears a vein of relief in Corvo’s tone. “How’s your leg?”

Daud grits his teeth when he moves too quickly, straining the wound. “It’s fine,” he lies.

“Rinaldo told me the damage will be permanent.”

“Rinaldo needs to learn about doctor-patient confidentiality and keep his fat mouth shut,” Daud grunts, limping around his desk and setting down the crutch. Corvo moves closer, but Daud can’t stand to look up and meet his gaze. He’s seen so much in Corvo’s eyes over the years. Haunted death, fury, burning curiosity, horror, grief, devastation – but never pity.

He doesn’t want to see that now.

“I’m sorry about your man, Daud,” Corvo says. “How are you holding up?”

Daud does _not_ want to open that tin of whale meat. “You know what’s funny?” he says instead, not laughing at all. “I sent Rulfio to the Oracular Order to spy on the Sisters because it was supposed to be the boring job. I thought he’d be safe there. Out of the way.” Daud grimaces, a bitter mixture like the toxins his mother used to brew swelling in his chest. “Everything I touch goes bad. I’m a _poison_.”

“No,” Corvo says sharply. “That’s not true. Emily won’t say so, but she is grateful.”

“Actually, she did say so.”

Corvo blinks. “She – did?” he says haltingly, and raises his eyebrows, stunned. “Oh. Wow. Well, I am, too. You saved us both. Again. Th—”

“Don’t. Don’t thank me. I don’t deserve your gratitude.”

“Yes, you do.” Corvo reaches out and grasps Daud’s arm. Daud sighs and pulls away, and Corvo steps back as if in disappointment. “Emily told me she released you from her service.”

“She did.” And Daud appreciates the sentiment, truly, but it doesn’t change a thing about his promise to her and Corvo.

Corvo looks down at the papers strewn across Daud’s desk, his eyes catching sight of the book – more battered than ever, the spine falling off and the pages frayed from how often they’ve been turned and marked.

“Look, you can’t start a _vineyard_ ,” Corvo exclaims when the silence drags on too long, wrenching his gaze away from _Ports of Call_. “That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard of. We need you _here_.”

What the hell is he going on about – oh. Corvo thinks –?

 _Oh_.

Fair’s only fair. Daud manages to hide a smile, looking away instead. “You don’t need me.”

“Fine, then,” Corvo snaps, “I _want_ you here.”

Daud’s sure that Corvo doesn’t really want that either. He just feels… guilty, or something. It’s not his fault Rulfio is dead – it’s Daud’s – but he doesn’t need to promise things he doesn’t mean just to keep a resource around and handy.

“You goddamn tease, Attano,” Daud mutters. “You don’t want me here.”

Corvo’s eyes look wounded. “I do, though,” he says softly. _Intently_.

Daud stares at him, blinking.

“I, uh,” Corvo says, rubbing the back of his neck with a wince. “I handled the other day really badly, didn’t I.”

“Just a little,” Daud agrees, and shakes his head, looking down. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve – it was wrong of me to –”

“No,” Corvo interrupts, “it’s – you were right. I _did_ start it.” He huffs, a small, self-depreciating smile crossing his face. “I just didn’t think you’d – didn’t think you felt that way. And when you – Ah. You mightn’t have noticed, but I’m not exactly the most stable of human beings.”

Daud takes a few limping steps towards Corvo, and, holding his gaze intently, tugs his jacket open. Corvo’s eyes widen in alarm, but all Daud does is reach into the inside pocket.

“No,” he drawls, pulling out the coin pouch that had _definitely_ been on his belt not two minutes ago, “really? I wouldn’t have guessed.”

Corvo grimaces. “Sorry. I promised Emily I’d work on that little issue.”

Daud snorts. “Did she find your copper wire stash?”

“It wasn’t _only_ copper wire,” Corvo mutters defensively.

So, also half of Dunwall’s loose change and a metric ton of bone charms.

“Just because your name means ‘crow’ doesn’t mean you have to _act_ like one,” Daud points out. “But at least the Tower will have enough bath salt to keep the Empress clean for the next twenty years, I guess.”

“You’re not nearly half as funny as you think you are, you know,” Corvo says, his mouth twisted into a wry smile, then he turns serious once more, exhaling loudly and stepping tentatively closer. “Look, I don’t… I don’t know where this is going to go,” he admits, almost helplessly. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to reconcile what Jessamine’s death did to me with how I feel about you, or what she’d think about it, or what Emily will say, or how we’d even be able to maintain something like this if it even _happens_ –”

“Are you sure you’re trying to _convince_ me –?”

“Shut up and let me finish. I guess I’m just saying there are a lot of things I don’t know. But something I _do_ know is that… I forgave you the moment you saved Emily and brought her back to me.”

 _I was never after your forgiveness_ , Daud thinks, but Corvo’s words unlock something deep inside him, touch some deep longing he’d concealed from himself that desperately, achingly _needed_ Corvo’s forgiveness. Forgiveness he doesn’t deserve, not now, not in a million years – forgiveness he shouldn’t have craved the way a man dying of thirst in the desert craves the smallest drop of water. He doesn't deserve this.

He exhales shakily and leans his elbows on the desk, covering his face with his hands, steady once more. “Damn you, Attano,” he whispers.

Corvo moves closer again, until their shoulders are almost touching. “And I know, more than anything, that I want to give this a chance,” he says, voice just a little too low and husky, and Daud can feel his burning gaze on the back of his neck, setting fire to his blood and making his heart race. “To give _us_ a chance. I don’t know if it’ll even work out, but… please don’t go. Not yet. I’d like you to stay. Not because you think you owe me and Emily a debt that you’ve more than repaid, but because I – I just want you to.”

Daud breathes hard and looks up from his hands, pushing himself to stand straight again. He faces Corvo, heart pounding his chest. “You know,” he says, trying to keep the waver out of his voice and a cocky grin off his mouth, “I wasn’t _actually_ planning on leaving. At all.”

Corvo stares at him, realisation dawning. “Oh, you _asshole_ ,” he snaps a heartbeat later. “You let me think –”

Daud presses his mouth softly to Corvo’s, capturing his moving lips in a gentle caress. Corvo grunts, an irritated noise at being interrupted, but then responds in kind, melting into the kiss, then releasing a groan of disappointment when Daud reluctantly pulls back far too soon.

“My life is in your hands, Corvo Attano,” Daud murmurs against his mouth. It has been since the day Daud gave it to him, all those months ago, in a crumbling, decaying building half-drowned in the Flooded District.

“So you’re definitely staying?” Corvo whispers, almost breathlessly.

“Actually, on second thought, I don’t really want that ship ticket I bought to Cullero to go to waste, so –”

“Shut the fuck up, Daud,” Corvo snaps, and crushes his mouth against Daud’s again, his kiss hot and heavy.

“Sir,” Thomas’s voice sounds from behind, “there’s a report here you might want to s– _Outsider’s balls!_ ”

Corvo breaks the kiss with a swear, and Daud exhales with a laugh, pressing his forehead against Corvo’s. “Thomas,” he says, voice a low warning.

He hears Thomas stepping backwards. “I, uh –” Thomas says. “I’ll just. I’ll come back later, then. It can – it can wait.”

Thomas transverses away, and Daud clears his throat. “So about that lock.”

Corvo smirks. “I told you it wasn’t implausible you’d want to bring company back to your room sometime.”

“Shut the fuck up, bodyguard,” Daud says, and kisses him again.

He doesn’t know where this is going to go. But his life is in Corvo Attano’s hands, and he’s ready for what comes.

* * *

**postscript**

_(as the sun goes)_

“Don’t go.”

“Corvo,” Daud warns, stuffing a shirt into his bag, “we’ve talked about this.”

“What could possibly be so important in Serkonos that you have to go personally? Usually you’d just send your men.”

Normally, yes, he would. Duke Theodanis Abele’s death a couple of years ago didn’t send Karnaca into turmoil, though Luca’s immature reign is… still in its early stages. Too early yet to tell if the deft hand of the Empress needs to be applied, or if Luca will grow into his father’s boots rather than turning out like his revolting, selfish brother that Billie killed years ago. Trade with Dunwall is fine and the reports of Guard brutality levels are nowhere near what it was like during Dunwall’s years of the plague, and although the bloodflies are reportedly worse this year than before Serkonos has had worse outbreaks in the past. Daud used to shoot the nests down with his crossbow as a kid, and play dares with the other neighbourhood children to see how close they could get to a swarm without getting stung. The status quo holds, so by all accounts there’s nothing happening in Karnaca (yet) that requires his attention any more than usual, least of all with a personal visit. Nothing that could justify the Royal Spymaster himself leaving his post in Dunwall.

Except for whispers of that _name_.

“Not for this,” Daud grunts, mouth twisted into a scowl. “I caught word of a problem."

"What sort of _problem_."

"One I thought I’d taken care of.”

Corvo is silent for a moment. “A danger to Emily?” he asks cautiously.

Daud doesn’t know, and he hopes to the Outsider himself that is isn’t what he thinks it might be. “It could be something,” he says. “Or it could be nothing. Either way, it’s something I need to see to personally.”

When he gets back, he decides, he promises himself he’ll tell Corvo about the Brigmore Witches.

“Really?” Corvo demands, crossing his arms. “Or are you just using this as an excuse to finally disappear to Cullero and start that vineyard? Skipping the entire continent seems like a _bit_ of an overreaction, you know.”

_Oh, for the love of –_

“I’m not leaving Dunwall because of the fight, Corvo,” Daud snaps. “But since you think I'm that petty and _you_ brought it up, my point still stands. You need to stop coddling Emily. She’s twenty-two. She can’t rule an Empire if you’re doing everything for her.”

“ _Don’t_ tell me how to raise my daughter, Daud,” Corvo says sharply. “You don’t have that right.”

A point Corvo made perfectly clear last week with an open palm. “But she’s not _just_ your daughter, Corvo," Daud bites out, his cheek dully aching with every terse word. "She’s the Empress. How much more raising can you possibly have left to do? My reports are supposed to go directly to her, not get filtered through you so that she can leave the boring stuff to her Lord Protector while she runs across rooftops every other night.”

Corvo throws his hands up, turning away with a growl of frustration, before exhaling loudly and rubbing his eyes. “I don’t want to argue about this again,” he says, sounding so very tired. “Not now.”

Daud sighs, feeling as tired as Corvo sounds. “Neither do I,” he admits, and rubs the palm of his hand against his forehead to massage the pain away. He stands and with a limp in his walk heads back over to the wardrobe, and packs another pair of pants.

He feels Corvo behind him, close but not quite touching.

“Don’t go,” Corvo says again, a soft, pleading murmur this time. His hand brushes across Daud’s, and Daud sighs and grasps it back briefly, setting the clothes down to face him.

Daud isn’t sure if it’s him or Corvo who moves first, but he presses his mouth to Corvo’s. Corvo’s kiss is hard and desperate, full of tension and anger, and it’s almost enough to convince Daud to cave in and stay and clear the air between them. They’ve had fights before – none as bad as this one, granted – and Daud doesn’t want to leave things like this. Corvo’s kiss consumes him, making it far too easy to fall into this embrace and tell him to lock the door, forget that he ever said anything about leaving Dunwall –

But he can’t. Not knowing he left a job unfinished. Not knowing _she_ might still be about there.

Daud pulls away, breathing hard, and rests his forehead against Corvo’s. “I _have_ to,” he says, begging Corvo to understand. “I’ll be back before you even notice I’m gone.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Corvo says. “I know I don’t say it very often, but –”

“I know,” Daud says. “And I know I don’t say it much either –”

“I know,” Corvo replies, offering him a withering smile. “A few weeks.”

“A few weeks,” Daud promises, and kisses him one last time.

**the end**


	2. shoot him through the heart

**stuff him in a sack**

The Months of Rain through to Ice are Corvo’s favourites, which he knows bewilders Emily to no ends. She’s insistent that this time of year should be his _least_ favourite, given that he spent the coldest months in Coldridge Prison and lost a toe on his right foot to frostbite. Emily isn’t incorrect in this; Corvo _does_ hate the cold – he hates the way it seeps into his bones and makes him shiver no matter how many layers he wears, or how close to the fireplace he sits, something that he never felt before his imprisonment.

It wasn’t just the hot iron being burned into his back, or the lashes, or the fingernails the torturer ripped out, or the number of times his head was held down into a bucket of ice water that he believes changed his tolerance for the coldest months of the year. It was the dark, freezing cell he was left in to rot, filthy and dripping water everywhere, and the rag for a shirt that barely kept him from allowing the air like cold iron to consume him and still his heart. That, he thinks, was the worst part. The part of not _knowing_ if he would wake up the next morning, or find that the cold had crept its way into his chest and slowed his blood until he no longer breathed.

So no, he doesn’t like the cold; he likes that the coldest, wettest months make everyone else wear layers upon layers of clothes to keep the frost out.

More layers of clothes means it’s easier to pick peoples’ pockets without them noticing.

“It would be wonderful if the Empress attended the Communion Feast as our guest of honour,” Jasper Catherick drones on. “What with her public appearances declining in recent years, we feel this would be an excellent opportunity for her to show support for the religious and philosophical backbones of Gristolian society.”

Daud likes to act as though he disapproves, but Corvo knows damn well that he goes through peoples’ pockets as well.

“I’m the Spymaster,” Daud had said pointedly. “And the difference is that I put their stuff _back_ after I’ve looked at it.”

The difference is that Corvo is better at it than Daud is, and Daud is just jealous. The trick is proximity and a deft hand; most people are right-handed and therefore put their coin pouches in their right pockets or on the right-hand side of their belts, and make the mistake of thinking it’s secure there. Proximity works best when in crowded areas; where people are pressed against one another, like in a lift, or in the busy market square on a warm day, so they don’t notice the slight pressure of a hand slipping into their back pocket as the coin pouch is lifted out.

In the cold months, people instinctively huddle together for warmth, and the more clothes there are, the less pressure they feel.

It also helps to have supernatural abilities that he ritually “obscenely abuses”, according to Daud.

Corvo nods along, agreeing with whatever it is that the High Overseer and High Oracle are saying about the Communion Feast, turning a cool, smooth key over in his pocket. He has no idea what the key is for and doesn’t really care to find out; it’s just that Jasper Catherick was standing next to him when they passed through the doorway and his jacket pocket was _right there_ , and ever since Daud left for Serkonos five weeks ago and hasn’t contacted him yet he’s been a little… _anxious_.

The first time he picked a pocket was many years before Coldridge, but Coldridge was when it started. The guard didn’t even notice him sneak up from behind, and Corvo figured that if he really _was_ going to make it out of the prison then he’d need money once on the outside if he wanted to survive. And then he stole a gun, and a private letter, and an apple that he ate right through to the core, and some more money, and figured he could trade some copper wire for money as well, and he wasn't going to say no to the contents of an abandoned safe, and then… things got out of control around the stage of arriving at the Hound Pits Pub, which he promptly looted from top to bottom.

Going from six months of having nothing to suddenly _having things_ was definitely thrilling. It’s a bad habit, he admits – one that Emily has tried to break of him, to varying degrees of success.

“You’re the father of an _Empress_ ,” she’d said a few years ago after receiving yet another complaint from the Boyles that their priceless diamond necklace heirloom went mysteriously missing after his visit. “We have money, you don’t need to _steal!_ ”

That wasn’t the point, but he promised to do better. Which he has been.

For the most part.

“…so we can begin to promote the event with the Empress’s support and expected appearance?” Jasper Catherick is saying, and Corvo forces himself to pay attention.

“Uh, yeah, sure,” he says.

The High Overseer and the High Oracle smile in unison.

“Excellent,” Jasper Catherick says. “I’ll make arrangements with the Royal Spymaster –”

“He’s unavailable,” Corvo says, just a little too sharply.

“That’s too bad,” Catherick says, not missing a beat, which makes Corvo think he knew full well that Daud isn’t in Dunwall. “When will he return?”

_A few weeks_ , Daud had promised, and it’s been five already.

It only takes two weeks by ship to reach Karnaca from Dunwall.

“Should be soon,” Corvo says, and his hand twitches, aching to add something else alongside the key he’s twisting in his pocket.

“Thank you for your time, Lord Protector,” High Oracle Marion Ballard says graciously. “I look forward to finally consulting with the Empress. She’s twenty-two now, is she not?”

“She is.”

“A fine age for a young woman in her position to begin a more in-depth study of history and politics,” the High Oracle says.

She sounds like she’s been talking to Daud, who’d said just about the same thing during their argument but with a lot more cursing. Corvo narrows his eyes at Marion Ballard’s not-so-subtle attempt at recruiting the Empress to the Blind Sisters. He tries to imagine his daughter sitting through history lectures and reading essays on the politics of Morley during the potato famine, and fails.

“I’ll be sure to mention it to her,” Corvo says. He rises to shake the High Oracle’s hand, then the High Overseer’s, deftly removing his wristwatch in the same movement.

They turn to leave, and Corvo escorts them and their accompanying Overseers and Oracles to the elevator. As they step into it and hit the button to return them to the ground floor of the palace, Jasper Catherick rests his hands in his pockets and frowns.

“Hmm,” he murmurs to himself, his hand clenching around in his empty pocket. “I could’ve sworn…”

“Have you lost something, High Overseer?” Corvo asks.

“No, I must have left it on my desk,” he replies, pulling his hand out of his pocket. “Good day, Lord Protector. I look forward to speaking with you again soon.”

* * *

The thing is, he can’t even remember how the argument started, and didn’t even realise that an argument _was_ happening until Daud called him an idiot and accused him of being no better than Burrows or Havelock for sheltering Emily from the world, and then one thing led to another until Corvo was yelling back that Daud was the last person in this entire world who had _any right whatsoever_ to tell him how to raise _his daughter_ considering what he’d _done_ –

They didn’t speak for a week, which Emily took great pleasure from. When they finally ended up in the same room again, it was only so that Daud could gruffly tell him that he was leaving for Serkonos to follow up a report that troubled him.

No apologies were made.

“Sir? Are you listening to me?”

Corvo inhales sharply and looks up at the masked Whaler. “Yes,” Corvo says, then grimaces. “Sorry. No. What were you saying, Thomas?”

“The Hatters. They’re becoming more aggressive and inciting gang warfare to recover the territory they lost to the Dead Eels.”

“Right.”

Whenever Daud is out of Dunwall, Thomas usually takes over duties as Spymaster. It’s not that the younger man does a poor job; far from. It’s just that Corvo would be able to concentrate a lot better if he’d heard word from Daud by now.

“Did he tell you why he was leaving?” Corvo interrupts, cutting Thomas’s analysis of the gang movements and motivations short.

Behind his mask, Thomas is no doubt bristling. “No, sir. But he seemed more agitated than usual.”

Corvo chews the inside of his cheek.

“I’ll be taking some of the men tonight,” Thomas continues. “No engagement – just recon.”

“All right. Let me know how it goes.”

“Yes, sir.”

Thomas gathers his maps and papers and passes along the latest ‘temperature’ reports taken of the citizens across the Isles and their attitudes towards the Empress, which Corvo takes and tucks away to read later. Before Thomas leaves, Corvo notices him surreptitiously patting down his pockets. He doesn’t need to worry – he had nothing on him in the first place.

“Oh,” Thomas adds as he’s about to leave Corvo’s office. “The Empress’s meeting with her advisors started ten minutes ago.”

“Good.”

“You might want to sober her up and peel her off Wyman and ask if she’d like to actually attend it.”

_Wyman._

Corvo closes his eyes. “Thank you, Thomas,” he grits out.

Thomas transverses away in a cloud of ash, and Corvo storms off towards the safe room.

The safe room stinks of fine hashish that reminds Corvo sharply of his years with Jessamine before she fell pregnant with Emily – those late, late nights spent curled up together in her secret room behind the fireplace, the hookah in the corner that they would take turns puffing from and giggling together as the drug went to their heads and often a lot more. He remembers the curve of her waist and the giddy smile on her lips as he kissed his way down her body, half-drunk with desire and half-high from white tobacco leaves, her gentle hand in clenching in his hair as he moved past her breasts, her navel, the insides of her thighs.

She’d been in her early twenties. Jessamine Kaldwin was a model Empress in every single way: studious and devoted. But getting high occasionally was a right of passage. Scolding Emily would be nothing short of hypocritical considering what her own parents used to get up to.

The difference was, he and Jessamine never got high and horny in the middle of the day when she was required to attend meetings.

“You have five seconds to put clothes on!” Corvo snaps, leaving the sliding bookcase door open to air the safe room, and inside he hears Emily muffle a shriek and Wyman swear roughly, landing on the ground with a thud.

He gives them five seconds and stomps in, his boots thudding hard across the stone floor.

“L-Lord Protector!” Wyman stammers, jumping to a standing position as though _not_ completely nude under the sheets. “We were just – uh –”

Wyman withers under Corvo’s glare and falls silent, knowing not to say anything stupid after _last_ time.

“Oh, father, don’t be cross. We were just –” Emily covers her mouth to hide a snort of laughter when Corvo turns his gaze to her. “We were just studying.”

Sometimes, it’s nice to see his daughter’s eyes bright and wide and _happy_ , sparkling with cheekiness in a way that reminds him so much of Jessamine. He has too many sleepless nights where he dreams of his young daughter and her eyes of steel, a complete stranger without any trace of Jessamine left in her. Times like this reassure him that Jessamine _is_ there in her, somewhere – that Emily can be happy, and kind, and still enjoy life.

Unfortunately, today is not one of those days that he’s happy about this fact. He narrows his eyes.

“Count backwards from twenty,” he orders.

“Father,” Emily says, trying to use her Empress voice, but the effect is ruined by the slight hiccup in the middle of the word.

“Don’t make me repeat myself.”

Emily fumes and does as he says, only mixing up twelve and eleven.

“Good enough,” Corvo says, and picks up a glass of water on the side of the table and splashes it in her face.

Emily shrieks. “Don’t _do_ that!”

“Sober up, shower, and get to your meeting.”

Emily glares at him in disgust and snatches her jacket up off the floor. “Just because Daud is away doesn’t mean you have to double as his asshole,” she hisses.

Wyman laughs. “Ha! I bet he’s familiar enough with it to pull off a convincing impress—” Wyman stops immediately when both Emily and Corvo turn their identical, fuming glares in the same direction, and audibly swallows. “Uh. Oh. Oh no. Sorry. Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean – I mean I, I – I’ll –”

“ _Out_.”

“Yes, Lord Protector.” Wyman gathers the clothes strewn around the room and flees, tripping up the stairs only a little.

“Emily,” Corvo says tightly, “I don’t care what you do during your private hours, but you aren’t a teenager anymore. When your mother was your age, she –”

“Oh, don’t,” she snaps back at him, wiping the water from her face with the sleeve of her shirt. “I’ve heard it all before. Mother was perfect, mother did this, mother did that, mother would _never_ be late for a meeting, mother would only get high with her Lord Protector at nighttime –”

“Perhaps if you spent less time out on the rooftops and more in the palace, you’d have time to get high at midnight instead of midday when you have meetings you’re expected to attend.”

“You’re even started to _sound_ like him,” Emily says. “It’s just a weekly meeting. There’s nothing they’re going to say that I didn’t hear last week, or the week before that, or the week before that.”

“That isn’t the point.”

“The point is that you’re just upset because you had a fight with Daud and now he’s not talking to you, so you’re taking it out on me,” Emily says, buttoning up her jacket and straightening her hair.

The point is that Emily is slacking off and doing all of the things that Corvo said she should be allowed to experience, given that Daud destroyed her childhood.

Corvo might as well have slapped him.

…He _did_ slap him.

He sighs now and rubs his forehead, as though doing so will rid the image of Daud’s stricken face from his mind. “I’m upset because you’re not taking your responsibilities seriously. And I don’t like you hanging around that Wyman so much.”

“Yes, yes, I know, ‘bad influence’ and all that,” Emily drawls, doing a remarkable impression of his own gravelly voice. “If Daud couldn’t turn up anything more incriminating on Wyman other than white tobacco possession, I don’t know why you insist on –”

“Oh, so you read his report on _that_ , did you?” Corvo grumbles, holding out his hand to help her up the staircase.

Emily rolls her eyes. “When _is_ he coming back? It’s been weeks now.”

“Soon,” Corvo says. _Hopes_. He owes Daud an apology. Or two. Or… more. He manages to smirk at his daughter. “Why, do you miss him or something?”

Emily’s expression transforms into one of utter disgust, and Corvo laughs softly, pushing her towards the ensuite bathroom and waving his hand under his nose to dissipate the smell of hashish following her.

“Get rid of that smell,” he orders. “I’ll speak with your advisers today instead. But only _this once_.”

* * *

He has grown too accustomed to sharing a bed with another person to now be comfortable sleeping alone. It’s not even that he and Daud share a room, or spend every other night together. At best it’s once a week, maybe twice, when their nights off synchronise and they’re able to finally reach for each other and clumsily back up against the edge of the bed. Sometimes clothes are haphazardly thrown around the room; sometimes it’s slow and measured and fingers gently move down shirts to undo it one button at a time, laying the clothes across the back of a chair as they take their time. And other times, no clothes are removed at all, and Corvo just slips into the bed beside him, enjoying the feel of Daud half-awake, shifting over to wrap his arm around his waist and tug him closer while they both drift to sleep.

It’s now been five weeks without Daud, six without being able to press up against him at night, and the sleeplessness is starting to show in the form of bags under his eyes and an apathy towards shaving.

He spends tonight over his desk instead, sorting through letters to Emily and reports from Thomas, putting them into piles separated by importance. Most end up in the ‘shred’ pile – things that he can just summarise and pass on to Emily over breakfast and sort out before the end of the day. The clock ticks over to just past midnight when he hears someone _running_ , thundering footsteps ploughing up the corridor to his room.

“What the –” Corvo mutters, tapping into the power of the Void to peer through the walls. The world casts in shades of dark blue and he sees a figure in yellow, yanking off his mask as he slams Corvo’s doors open, barreling inside.

Which one is that – Aedan? No, can’t be, Aedan is with the City Watch – _Tynan_. Tynan runs in, wheezing from exertion, and Corvo meets him halfway and grabs him by the arm to keep him upright.

“What is it? What happened?” Corvo demands, mind half-blank. Since when do any of Daud’s Whalers _run_ through the palace instead of appearing in clouds of ash?

“It’s – Thomas, sir,” Tynan gasps. “There’s been a – there’s been an accident. We need you down in the physician’s wing. _Urgently_.”

Thomas is a bloodied mess. His entire body is just – _broken_. Ribs cracked, body twisted, bleeding from every joint and his skin bruised black and blue which Corvo sees as Rinaldo deftly cuts the blood-soaked fabric from his body.

“Everyone out of my surgery!” Rinaldo snaps at the small group of Whalers crowded around Thomas. “ _Out!_ ”

They shuffle out one by one, leaving only Corvo and Royal Physician and his assistants.

“Help me take off his shoes,” Rinaldo tells his apprentice, who nods and starts cutting the boots of Thomas’s feet and legs, which are twisted at unnatural angles.

“Will he be okay?” Corvo says, horrified. “What happened to him?

“I don’t know and I don’t know. All I can tell you at this point is that even if he lives, he’ll never walk again.”

“He’ll – _what?_ ”

“I need you out of here so I can work, Lord Attano.”

Numbly, Corvo is escorted out of the surgery while Rinaldo starts saving Thomas's life, where he is left to wait alongside the Whalers.

“The Hatters did this to him?” Corvo murmurs, watching through the glass as Rinaldo barks out orders to his assistants and nurses, hooking Thomas up to ventilator tubes. The Hatters are a violent, unpleasant lot, but this is more brutal than usual, even for them. “Thomas said you were just doing recon – no interaction. How did this happen?”

He immediately thinks the worst – a gang war. It’s the last damn thing Dunwall needs right now, especially while Daud is abroad.

Two of the Whalers glance at each other.

“Sir…” the one on the left says, voice strained.

“This… wasn’t the work of the Hatters, Lord Attano,” the other speaks. Kent, Corvo thinks is name is. “Thomas, he… he fell.”

“He _fell?_ ” Corvo repeats, disbelieving. “What, off a rooftop? How’d he manage that?”

In all his years of knowing Daud’s trusted second-in-command, he’s never once heard of the stealthy, silent Thomas to fall from anything.

“We were transversing from one balcony to another – following the Hatters,” Kent stammers, wringing his wrist. “He was midair when our powers just – stopped.”

Corvo blinks. “What do you mean, _stopped_?”

“Stopped working, Lord Attano,” Kent says, glancing between his fellow Whalers. “The Arcane Bond. It’s – it’s been severed.”

* * *

**and throw him over**

The book _Corvo Attano: The Royal Protector In Our Times_ , in Corvo’s opinion, is a piece of sensationalist trash. It was released by the palace for the purpose of good publicity after Gerard Magnus’s and Odessa White’s failed attempt to remove him from the playing field. The book is barely more than a hundred pages and declares itself to be the most ‘comprehensive and detailed biography of the Lord Protector, with his approval’, both statements being blatant lies. It’s not that Corvo is offended by the idea of a bit of good publicity – Void knows he needed it after Emily assumed the throne. He’s offended by the way it condenses the most important events of his life into a mere few paragraphs, listing them as though they belonged on a shopping list of grand achievements instead of fundamentally affecting him as life-changing moments.

The book says he “dazzled” the people of Karnaca when he entered and won the Blade Verbena at the age of sixteen, and it’s true, he did – but there’s more truth in the number of months he spent training, how badly he blistered his hands and his feet from the hours per day he practiced each stance and form by spying on the Royal Guard training sessions with a half-broken telescope that wouldn’t focus properly. There’s more truth in the way he slipped into a narrow, abandoned alley afterwards and cried, realising that his hard work had finally paid off and he’d be able to leave the slums of Batista and start a new life, a _better_ life.

It says nothing about the 2nd Day of the Month of Rain, 1827 – the day he first held Emily in his arms, barely a few minutes old and already squalling, wrinkled and tiny and so utterly _beautiful_ ; nothing about the way he started to cry and blubbered something about being afraid of hurting her, nothing about the way Jessamine – exhausted from childbirth and watching him with bleary but oh so happy eyes – laughed softly and promised he wouldn’t. Nothing about the way he kissed his infant daughter’s forehead and whispered to her that he loved her, more than anything in this world, and he would do _anything_ for her.

Its recount of the 5th Day of the Month of Harvest, 1837 – the day Jessamine died in his arms – is basic, at best. It says little about how Hiram Burrows and Overseer Campbell hired a band of assassins to murder their Empress in the light of day, and that Corvo wasn’t even meant to be there at all. The only thing that piece of trash masquerading as a biography has to say about the matter is ‘ _When the Empress fell, Corvo was accused of regicide and sentenced to execution’_ – as though Corvo was not rendered powerless to prevent the woman he loved from being killed, as though Emily was not snatched from before his eyes. It says nothing about the roaring in his ears and the feeling that his life was ending the same time Jessamine’s blood ran from her chest, nothing about the fact that the only thing preventing Corvo from ending his own life in despair was the knowledge that his daughter was out there and _needed his help_ , and he would survive anything to find her and make her safe again. It says nothing about how Corvo didn’t say a single word for six months after that day on the gazebo. Not in Coldridge, not when being tortured or interrogated, not even to ask for water or food. Not to the Loyalists, who issued him orders and targets. Not a single word until he found Emily in the Golden Cat, when she saw his mask and asked who he was.

It took him three tries to get his throat working, and when he spoke, pulling off his mask of death with a shaking hand, the first word he’d said in six long months was his daughter’s name. _Emily_ , he’d said. _Emily, it’s me._ The book mentions nothing about how Emily vaulted over towards him and he caught her in a tight embrace and swore to never, ever let her out of his sight again – that he’d protect her and keep her safe and she’d never have to be scared or alone again.

It also mentions nothing about how he spared the assassin Daud’s life – and how in return, the assassin Daud, responsible for taking the Empress’s life, saved him _and_ Emily. Nothing about how in that one moment – that one heartbeat – that Daud brought Emily back to his arms and met his eyes, Corvo _forgave_ him. A monumental shift in his life; another event that drastically altered who he is as a person, and set his life on a path he never imagined.

If _Corvo Attano: The Royal Protector In Our Times, 2 nd Edition_ were to be republished tomorrow, he numbly thinks, it will say nothing about how on the 16th Day of the Month of Rain, 1849, the world swims and his vision blurs and he feels himself pitch against the side of the wall, unable to hold himself straight – nothing about how his legs start to collapse from under him, and that he only stays standing because Kent and Tynan grab him by his arms and keep him upright.

Denial comes first, of course. One heartbeat. Two heartbeats. Corvo blinks and tries to speak, then tries to speak again.

“Severed?” he finally manages to say, ears roaring. “What does that _mean?_ You mean –”

“The bond is _gone_ , sir.”

“Why? Because Daud’s in Serkonos?”

Kent shifts uncomfortably. “No, sir,” he says quietly. “Distance… doesn’t affect us.”

Right. Corvo knows that. It’s a stupid thing to suggest. His blank mind scrabbles around to find some other explanation, and he comes up with nothing. “Then –”

“The Arcane Bond only ends when Daud wants it to, or if –”

_Don’t. Don’t say it._

“ – or if he’s… dead. Sir.”

No. He doesn’t want to hear that. He won’t believe that. He _won’t_. “No.”

Through the glass into the operating theatre, Thomas is being kept alive with a tube that runs down his throat while the Royal Physician tries to stop the bleeding.

“Lord Attano –”

_Just breathe_ , he thinks. “He’s not dead. He must be in trouble, or – or he’s – injured, or captured, or hurt and needs help – the bond would break if his hand was cut off, wouldn’t it? I need to send people to Karnaca –”

Kent’s expression is one of despair, but not for fear of Daud. It’s pity for Corvo.

Just breathe, he thinks again, but it’s Daud’s voice he hears and he can’t breathe at all.

_A few weeks,_ Daud had promised him, and Daud never breaks his promises to Corvo.

_Never_.

* * *

It’s as though Daud has simply ceased to exist – as though one week he arrived in Karnaca, and the next he vanished into thin air.

When his men – Daud’s men – tell him the trail has gone cold after three months of relentless searching, Corvo appeals to Emily. She’ll be fine, he thinks, to be on her own for a couple of weeks while he searches for Daud. She’s old enough, responsible enough, she doesn’t need him to hold her hand all the time which is exactly what Daud had said (shouted) in between Corvo yelling back at him to keep his goddamned unwanted opinions to himself. She’ll understand. She _must_.

“No,” Emily says, “you’re not going to Serkonos.”

“But –”

Emily silences him with a look. “You don’t trust the reports?” she demands. “If our contacts say he’s gone, then he’s gone. If he hasn’t been found by now, what’s the alternative? I know you two fought badly before he left –” and she found it _very_ amusing, he thinks bitterly, “– so maybe he finally decided to disappear like he always said he wanted to. A vineyard in Cullero, wasn’t it?”

She knows _damn_ well Daud wouldn’t have done anything of the sort. “He wouldn’t do that,” Corvo says, even though the words Daud hoarsely spoke so long ago in the Flooded District with Corvo’s blade pressed to his throat, about leaving this city, fading from the memory of those who reside here, keep running through his mind.

But that was before everything changed between them. That was before Corvo collapsed after their duel, his lungs filling with fluid, a side-effect of the poison he was given. That was before Daud picked up the mantle of the Masked Felon and saved Emily when Corvo couldn’t, before he brought Emily back to his arms, before Daud kept on saving them, again and again and again. That was long before Corvo held him in the aftermath of the first time they made love, their sweat-slicked bodies trembling against each other and Daud’s hand stroking down his scarred back as he murmured against Corvo’s shoulder that he loved him.

Emily shrugs, as if she hasn’t been nonchalantly asking him for status updates for weeks and wringing her wrist surreptitiously under the desk. “He spent a lifetime running away from things,” she points out.

“He _changed_.”

“No one changes at _that_ age,” she sneers. “They have a mid-life crisis and act out for a decade before going straight back to their old ways.”

“I am _not_ his midlife crisis,” Corvo snarls. “He needs help! I can’t just –”

“Can’t just what? Admit that he’s gone?” she cries. “Do I even have to tell you _again_ you’re being foolish? Look at you! You haven’t shaved, you haven’t showered in Void knows how long – my advisors are pressuring me to find another Spymaster. It’s been months! Daud is dead. He’s dead, and you need to accept it because you are _not_ to waste any more of our resources scouring Karnaca for his bloodfly-ridden _corpse!”_

“Stop it –!”

“ _He’s dead, father!_ ”

“ _YOU DON’T KNOW THAT!_ ”

His roar stuns Emily into shocked silence, a rare thing to see from his usually sharp-tongued daughter. She blinks at him, the disdain in her face fading to be replaced by something far softer, and a strange, wistful feeling swells in Corvo’s chest because she looks so much like Jessamine in this moment and it’s enough to make him want to weep.

“You don’t –” Corvo chokes out, voice a whisper now, and covers his face with his hands.

Emily walks around to his side of the desk and he doesn’t stop her when she silently opens the drawer. Crammed inside it are multiple coils of copper wire, every single loose coin he’s found around the palace this week, several necklaces and diamond rings, and a veritable mountain of keys he’s picked out from random peoples’ pockets.

He’s just glad she didn’t decide to open the wardrobe.

“Oh, father…” she sighs, shaking her head.

Corvo slams the drawer shut, face burning.

Emily sighs again. “I know this is – hard for you,” she says haltingly, which must have been just as hard for her to say. It’s not often that Emily acknowledges his relationship with Daud; usually she prefers to pretend nothing is happening at all, and on the rare occasions that she does acknowledge it, it’s usually with scorn and some salty barbs aimed at her Spymaster that seem to amuse more him than they upset him. But now her eyes of steel soften and she rests her hand on Corvo’s arm and squeezes gently.

“I’ll write to the Duke and ask if he can lend his Guard to making some discreet enquiries,” she tells him. “The High Overseer and High Oracle may be able to ask the same of the Abbey and Oracular Order in Karnaca. But that’s _all_ I’m promising.”

He closes his eyes and grasps her hand back. “Thank you,” he whispers.

“Just – please don’t get your hopes up.”

The alternative – accepting what everyone else is saying – is too daunting, too awful to contemplate. They may as well just shoot him in the chest and be done with it.

Hope is the only thing he _has_.

* * *

Thomas can’t sneak up on him anymore. The creak of his wheelchair as he pushes himself down the corridors of the palace can be heard from miles away like a mockery of the figure of shadows and stealth he used to be. As if it’s not enough that he will never walk again – the sound has to follow him everywhere he goes to drive the point home.

Corvo opens the door for him before Thomas can knock, allowing him entry. Thomas grimaces in thanks, wheeling himself in, one jerking movement at a time.

“Thomas,” Corvo says, and doesn’t offer him a seat, having trained himself out of that instinct. “What can I do for you?”

Thomas looks grim, but then, he’s only looked that way since the day he finally woke from his coma, silent and withdrawn and paralysed from the waist down.

“Lord Attano,” he says, “I’m here to officially resign.”

_Resign?_ “But you can’t,” Corvo blurts out.

Thomas raises an eyebrow, looking very much like Daud for a moment. “With all due respect, sir, I can,” he says. “I came to work for you and the Empress because I followed Daud here.” He pauses. “Daud’s gone.”

Corvo restrains a growl. “He’s not dead,” he says, managing to restrain a snap. “I can’t – I _won’t_ believe that.”

Thomas sighs, looking down. “It’s been seven months, sir,” he says. “No one has found any trace of him. It’s like the moment he set foot in Karnaca, he vanished into thin air. If he’s not dead, then the only other explanation is that he ran away and severed the Arcane Bond and is never coming back, and I don’t really see him doing that. Do you?”

_I was thinking about starting a vineyard_ , Daud had said, on more than one occasion, but it was a joke. It’s _their_ joke. Corvo tries to imagine Daud kneeling in a row of dirt, tending to grapes on the vines and dirt under his fingernails, the hot Serkonan sun glaring down on his bare shoulders and sweat sliding across his skin between strong shoulder blades. It’s an attractive image but it’s _still_ the most fucking absurd thing Corvo has ever heard of.

He supposes there’s some sort of irony about this entire situation. Corvo knows a thing or two about irony; about the way he pressed a brand of hot iron into Campbell’s face and ruined him for everything he was worth, about the way he used Hiram Burrows’ own words against him and broadcast them out for the city to hear, ensuring the man was destroyed by the very apparatus that kept him in power.

Of course it would be Serkonos where Daud vanished. Corvo remembers his – _their_ – childhood home, the streets of Batista where they grew up. The smell of dust in the air, the miners who would sometimes cough blood and silver, the swarms of bloodfies in infested homes where the kids would push and shove each other and make dares and bets to see how long they could sit next to a nest without getting stung. Corvo remembers hearing about the son of a witch, the Outsider’s Bastard – a boy a bit older than himself who had as many enemies as he did admirers, a boy whose mother was born in Pandyssia and could kill a man with a single drop of poison. A boy who was showing off one day by shooting ten bottles all the way down the other end of the cobbled street with a crossbow he’d stolen from the City Watch.

_Smash smash smash_ , one right after the other – perfect shots with perfect aim, shattering the bottles that were so far away Corvo could barely see them squinting. The steadiest hands in Serkonos, the son of a witch boasted, grinning cockily.

Corvo hasn’t always remembered that he possessed this memory. For the longest time he’d forgotten about it entirely, until steadily – somewhere during the first year Daud worked in the palace – whispers of it filtered back as though he’d pulled it from the Void itself. A slow, jarring realisation that Corvo _knew_ Daud, only briefly, as a child. He remembers now the way he approached the son of a witch at the age of eleven, nervous and stammering and asking how he’d _done_ that because it was _incredible_ and could he please please teach him _please?_

The son of a witch grinned that cocky grin and stood behind Corvo, helping him wrap his hands that were too small around the crossbow, how to aim and stand and breathe and pull the trigger for that perfect shot. He remembers now that he thought about that encounter for years afterwards but he never saw the boy again, hearing only rumours around the streets that the Overseers finally did the witch in. The boy vanished without a trace, as though snatched from this world by the Void itself, never to be seen or heard from again.

Of _course_ it would be fucking Karnaca.

“I’m sorry, Lord Attano,” Thomas continues, “but I can’t stay here. Not anymore. Not without him. Not like…” He closes his eyes, and not for the first time Corvo wonders if Thomas regrets Rinaldo didn’t just let him die on the operating table. “Not like _this_.”

Thomas is worth more than the powers Daud gifted him – worth so much more than his ability to slip through the city of Dunwall unseen and collect information that no others would be able to uncover. That’s what Corvo _should_ say, but finds himself blurting out instead: “What about your promise to Emily?”

Thomas shakes his head. “That was never my promise, Lord Attano,” he tells him. He’s certainly become more _frank_ over the years, Corvo realises – and if he wasn’t jaded before, he is now. “It was Daud’s. I was an assassin, and we were paid to do a job. We did that job, and I got paid. _He_ changed after he killed the Empress. I understood that – respected it, even. But I was only _ever_ here because I owed him everything. Now he’s gone. And even if I _wanted_ to stay here without him –” Thomas’s mouth twists bitterly and he waves a hand at his immobile legs. “I doubt I’d be of much use to you.”

“I thought you were a better person than that,” Corvo says, feeling nasty.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not.”

Corvo bristles. “Why are you so sure he’s dead? What if he’s being held hostage somewhere, and they – I don’t know, cut his hand off to stop him from escaping? That would sever the Arcane Bond, wouldn’t it?”

“Have you received any ransom notes? Blackmail?” Thomas shoots back. “If someone cut off his hand and was holding him hostage, I assure you that he wouldn’t let himself live long enough to be of any value. You _know_ that.”

Corvo stares at him, then shakily sinks into his chair.

Thomas sighs again, wheeling closer, creaking across the floor. “I’m sorry, Lord Protector,” he says. “I’d be happy to recommend some people – give you names for potential replacements for Daud as the Spymaster –”

“No. I’ll be taking that work on.”

“So Alexi will become the Empress’s new Royal Protector?”

Alexi is far too young still and has far too much to learn. Corvo shakes his head. “No, I’m maintaining my post.”

“You can’t do _both_.”

“I don’t intend to do _both_ forever,” Corvo snaps. “When I find Daud –”

He hates that look, the one that all of the Whalers share when Corvo says _when I find_ , the one that Emily wears when he joins her meetings in the mornings with bags under his eyes and his face unshaven, clothes rumpled because he hadn’t changed from the night before. Even Jasper bloody Catherick gazes at him with that fucking _pity_ in his eyes, and he’s sick of it because _Daud isn’t dead_.

“I should head off,” Thomas says, his tone making it perfectly clear that he has already mourned for the man he considered a father, and this isn’t a conversation he wants to have again, not now, not ever. “I have a boat to catch.”

A ship out at sea sounds like a bad idea for a man confined to a wheelchair, Corvo thinks, but then, there aren’t many places in this world that are kind to people who can no longer walk.

“Where will you go?” Corvo asks.

“Don’t know yet. But an old friend took pity on me and offered to help me out.” He smiles bitterly, and spins his chair around to wheel himself out of Corvo’s office. “I shouldn’t keep her waiting. Good luck, Corvo.”

He’s not talking about finding Daud.

“If you hear anything –” Corvo says.

“I’ll get in touch with you,” Thomas says, but there’s no promise in his tone, only a resigned capitulation to Corvo’s obsession.

“…Thanks, Thomas,” Corvo murmurs, and doesn’t stop him as he leaves.

* * *

**postscript**

_(early in the mornin')_

The Outsider stays silent, no matter how many shrines Corvo visits. He thinks that if he can just _talk_ to the enigmatic bastard, maybe he’ll offer him a hint, or a clue, but the Void doesn’t call to Corvo and eventually Corvo stops trying.

The reports pile up so he culls Emily’s official appearances to catch up on the sheer volume of intel from what remains of Daud’s spy network; when it’s a busy time of year for Emily he culls the reports and focuses on her, standing in for her appointments when she’s too tired to attend. He follows her out on the rooftops at night from a distance, making sure she doesn’t fall and break her neck, and maintains her self-defence lessons three times a week. She has perfected the Tyvian choke-hold now, and has a deadly aim with her crossbow.

Daud, Corvo thinks, would be proud of her.

Emily is patient with him, as best as she can be. She fluctuates between acting haughty that Daud is gone and muttering about the decline of quality and quantity of intel reports she receives, and sometimes – only sometimes – he sees her staring down with her eyes of steel at the gun Daud gave her as a child, a frown creased on her forehead.

It’s times like that he sees not himself, nor Jessamine in her, but Daud, and that hurts for a completely different reason entirely.

It is almost a year to the day that Daud vanished. Duke Luca Abele has informed Emily by letter that he can no longer afford to keep his men searching for Daud, and Jasper Catherick and Marion Ballard passed on similar messages from their counterparts in Karnaca.

There’s nowhere else _to_ look.

Emily finds him in the attic of the Tower where Daud made his home, sitting on the edge of the bed that Corvo sometimes shared with him, the place virtually untouched since the day he left, though kept dusted and clean by the servants. Just in case.

“I thought I’d find you sulking up here,” Emily says, sitting next to him. “You missed the meeting with Catherick and Ballard.”

“Sorry.”

“You should be – it was boring and I had to suffer through it on my own. You’re taking the next one.”

Corvo manages a small smile, but it’s gone faster than it appears and he cannot bring himself to make a smart comment back about Jasper Catherick’s finer qualities.

“It’s the… _not knowing_ that’s the hardest part,” he finds himself saying instead. “At least when Jessamine died, I knew _why_. I knew _how_. It was – final. I was there for her and she didn’t doubt that I loved her. She knew.”

Emily stays silent, and Corvo releases a shuddering sigh.

“I never got to apologise. The things I said, I can never – he must’ve thought I hated him. He must've – Gods. What if he really _did_ just leave to start that fucking vineyard? Had enough and just – _left_ , and doesn’t _want_ to be found?”

“No. He… loved you,” Emily says, wincing as she says this. “He wouldn’t have done that. Not to you.” The corner of her mouth twitches. “Not to me, either.”

Saying that costs her a _lot_.

He appreciates it, more than words can say. “…Thank you,” Corvo whispers. She grasps his hand, and they sit that way in silence for a while. “It’ll be a year to the day tomorrow.”

“I am _not_ holding a commemoration for him.”

Against himself and despite everything, Corvo finds himself laughing, a few tears slipping down his face at the same time. “I, uh,” Corvo eventually says, catching his breath and wiping his cheeks dry, “I really don’t think he’ll mind.”

“I guess not,” Emily agrees. “Do you know why he left? What he was searching for?”

“A report troubled him,” Corvo murmurs. _It could be something_ , Daud had said, _or it could be nothing._ “He just said he needed to see to it personally.”

Emily sighs. “I guess we’ll never know, now.”

“You really think he’s dead, don’t you,” Corvo says, and wonders if he’s starting to think it too.

“Yes.” She gazes at him, expression soft in this moment. So much like Jessamine. “Are you going to be okay?”

“As long as I have you, I’ll always be okay.”

Emily breathes in slowly. “All right,” she says, and tugs on his arm. “Come on. Ramsey’s fountain pen and pocket watch are missing and he’s kicking up a storm about it. They’re an _heirloom set_ , apparently.”

Corvo coughs. “He lost them? That’s… terrible.”

Emily narrows her eyes, and after a beat Corvo sheepishly produces the pen and watch from his inside jacket pocket, passing them over to her. Emily starts to reach for the heirloom set (they’re quite tacky in Corvo’s opinion), then changes her mind and pushes Corvo’s hand back towards him.

“On second thought, keep them,” she decides. “Ramsey’s being a bigger asshole than usual today.”

Corvo laughs and puts them back into his pocket, and thinks Daud would have laughed as well.

**the end**


	3. slice his throat

**slice his throat**

He tells Thomas first that he’s leaving.

“Do you want me to go instead?” Thomas asks, which is kind of him to offer, but Daud shakes his head.

“No.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No.”

“Do you want Kent or Tynan to go with you?”

“No,” Daud says again. “I’ll be fine, Thomas.”

Thomas squints at him dubiously. “You’re not running away, are you?”

“What makes you think I’d do that?”

“Your argument with Attano.”

Daud grimaces. “Does everyone know about that?”

Thomas is kind enough not to point out the splotchy bruise on Daud’s cheek. “It was a loud argument, sir.”

Which means half the palace knows. He sighs. “It has nothing to do with it.”

“Then you really are worried about something in your reports,” Thomas says.

He only came across it because he couldn’t sleep, and he couldn’t sleep because certain heated words exchanged between himself and Corvo repeat over and over again in his mind like a broken audiograph card. Any other person would have ignored it and perhaps, Daud thinks, he ought to have ignored it too, but when the Oracular Order in Karnaca releases a publication critiquing Empress Emily Kaldwin’s inconsistent policies and dedication to public service with a comment buried in the middle of the one-hundred-page document that is footnoted by an easily-missed, obscure reference to ‘the future Empress’s coven’ attributed to a “D.C., c. 1836”, it’s his job as Spymaster to pay attention.

“You’ve barely slept at all these last few days,” Thomas says. “I haven’t seen you like this since –”

“Brigmore.”

“Yes.” Thomas pauses. “ _Is_ it to do with –?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because if it’s her – if she’s back – you should tell –”

Daud silences him with a look. “I _don’t_ know,” he says again, more firmly this time, because if he says yes then Corvo without a doubt will ask Thomas, and while Daud trusts Thomas’s discretion, Corvo does rather have a way of weeding out answers. If Corvo is going to learn about Delilah, Daud will tell him personally. He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’d rather not worry Corvo or Emily without good reason.”

“So you’re going in blind,” Thomas says, in that long-suffering tone he adopts when he thinks Daud is being an idiot, which recently has been happening quite frequently.

“I’m not going into anything,” Daud protests. “I’m gathering information, that’s all.”

Which, granted, any of his Whalers could do. But the last time he let one of his Whalers gather information and pass along the lead, she walked him into a trap and betrayed him to the very person he was hunting. Not that he thinks Thomas – undyingly loyal Thomas – will betray him. But this, he needs to do himself.

_I forgave you the moment you saved Emily and brought her back to me_ , Corvo said, a long time ago, but somewhere amidst all of it he never quite forgave himself, and maybe his strange, deadly dance with Delilah never properly ended.

* * *

The argument was his fault, and the worst thing is, Daud doesn’t even remember how it started, only that he was trying to talk to Corvo about Emily and how she was neglecting her duties even more than usual since Wyman starting hanging around the palace, getting high instead of writing letters and sneaking out at night to prance across rooftops like an idiot instead of sleeping so that she’d get to her meetings on time the next morning, and Corvo _wasn’t listening_ , then one thing led to another and before he knew it, he’d snapped, “You’re an idiot.”

Corvo had blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” Daud said. “In fact, you’re more than idiot. How are you any better than Burrows? Or Havelock?”

It was around about this stage that Corvo realised they were even arguing. “Aside from the fact that I’m Emily’s father and I’m _not_ using her as figurehead while I plot to kill her parents?” he said tersely, and that, if nothing else, should have been Daud’s cue to stand down, but no one ever accused Daud of being a sensible or even sane person.

“Even though you attend all of her meetings on her behalf,” Daud listed, “read and filter my reports before they even get to her, let her neglect her duties –”

“She deserves a taste of what it’s like to be a normal person – a life,” Corvo added, eyes narrowed, “might I remind you, that _you_ took away from her.”

As if Daud needed the reminder, but he was feeling more angry than he was guilty. “She’s not a normal person and she was never going to have a normal life, regardless of my actions.”

“Your actions,” Corvo bit out, “certainly didn’t help.”

“You’re her Lord Protector, Corvo, not her regent,” Daud had snapped, and he’s not proud of the next words out of his mouth. “And frankly, you’re not even that good of a Lord Protector considering what happened to the last Empress you tried to –”

He knew the backhanded slap was coming, of course, but he didn’t move in time. Corvo’s hand swiped hard across his face with a loud _crack_ , the sound of flesh striking flesh echoing about the room, and pain flared, his right cheek smarting badly. He grunted with the impact, barely staggering with the blow. When he looked up, Corvo’s breathing was ragged and furious, his eyes hard and his body trembling as he pointed in Daud’s face.

“How,” Corvo snarled, teeth bared, “ _dare you_. You are the _last person_ in this entire world –”

Daud closed his eyes. “Corvo.”

“– who has any right whatsoever to tell me how to raise _my daughter_ when you were the one who destroyed her childhood – _murdered_ Jessamine –”

Daud really didn’t have anything to say after this – he just listened while Corvo yelled at him, face smarting in time with every fresh, fully deserved insult Corvo could come up with, such as how Daud was _nothing_ compared to Jessamine, how unworthy he was to even speak her name, how Corvo must have been _mad_ to not have sliced his fucking throat open when he had the chance –

It was a bad evening.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see how long this had been building between them. They rarely eat together, rarely spend time together outside of their respective duties to the crown, too wary of Emily’s opinionated feelings about the matter. They don’t even share a bedroom, and it’s been more than two months since they last slept together. As fond as Daud has become of Emily, as much as he will never blame Corvo for putting her first, the simple fact is that she was and always will be a barrier, that constant reminder of Daud’s crimes and how little he deserves Corvo’s forgiveness.

The argument wasn’t just about Emily, and it wasn’t just a result of poor communication either – though it certainly didn’t _help_ matters. Nothing Corvo said was untrue, just like how nothing Daud said was untrue, and that bad evening turned into a bad week and by the time Daud was packing, no apologies had been made.

He’ll change that when he gets back, he thinks. First thing he’ll do. A few weeks, he promised, and two have passed already by the time his ship lands in Serkonos.

He realises far too late that he didn’t even say goodbye to Emily. Not, he thinks, that she’ll care at all.

* * *

_What would I find,_ he wrote, years ago in a waterlogged journal that he kept with him in the Flooded District, chest aching and mind sluggish from the six months he’d spent detached from world after murdering the Empress, _if I went back to Serkonos? Would I find that it has rotted from the inside, just like Dunwall, or will it only appear that way because I’m the one who’s rotted?_

It’s hard to say which one it really is. This windswept city of Karnaca, always riddled with bloodflies and silver dust and the rotting bodies of dead wolfhounds bloated with larvae hasn’t changed, but it feels _worse_ than it did the last time he was here when he was sixteen years old. The reports said nothing about this; but then, they come from people who live here, who maybe haven’t noticed the change because it happened so gradually, year by year, that it’s simply normal. This city is unwell, and has been for some time, but –

It feels a little bit like home.

The house he grew up in with Jocheved has long fallen into disrepair; no one, obviously, wanted to move into the vacant house that belonged to a Pandyssian witch who was murdered by Overseers. The small hovel that Daud and his mother called home was once kept clean and orderly is overrun with bloodflies and half-buried in silver dust now, an undignified but perhaps fitting end to the house where he started to march down the path he chose, the house he couldn’t bear to return to after Jocheved’s brutal murder. Another thing he ran away from, thinking the consequences would never catch up to him.

He’s glad he didn’t leave her body in the house that he abandoned shortly after her death, taking to the streets with only a hastily packed bag of coin, poisons, and the stolen crossbow. His mother deserved a proper burial, not the one he’d done himself at the age of fourteen, cleaning her up as best he could taking her out to an old graveyard and digging the night away with a rusted shovel, too shallow a grave in soil that wasn’t treated well, but he didn’t have coin to pay for a proper service and the Watch would have tossed her corpse into a mass grave or cremated her remains.

There are pebbles along the street he grew up in – the streets he taught Corvo, once upon a time, how to aim and fire a crossbow – small white stones that are smooth to the touch and fit neatly in the palm of his hand. As a child he would throw them at bloodfly nests on dares, or through windows of the Watch officers to cause trouble. He scoops one up now and pockets it, the chalky dust coating his skin as he turns the cool stone in his fingers. Thomas once asked Daud why he leaves stones upon Rulfio’s grave, on the anniversary of his death each year, and the truth is, Daud doesn’t know – he just knows it’s something his mother did because it was something her family did, though unlike Jocheved he doesn’t have anyone to pass the tradition along to, and he’s all right with that.

The Witch of Batista, the people here called his mother before she died. Jocheved warned him never make an enemy of a witch, but he ended up doing a lot of things she told him not to do.

He wonders what she’d think of him now, his investigation at a dead end and nowhere else to go except back to Dunwall, back to Corvo, and he’s not sure he feels ready to do that just yet.

He’ll give it another week. One more week, and then he’ll go back to Dunwall.

Despite the sickness he tastes in the air, a bitter aftertaste left behind the silver dust, the transition between the Month of Nets and the Month of Rain is a fine time of year in Karnaca. The chill doesn’t pervade the south the same way it freezes over Dunwall, and the famous burning sun is tempered as well, leaving the city just warm enough to be comfortable, though he recalls his mother always did complain about the oppressive heat even when it wasn’t hot. Her Pandyssian blood never quite acclimatised to the warmth – much like how the blood of Serkonos in his own veins never quite made him comfortable in Dunwall.

Long days in the sun. Standing under the Serkonan sun reminds him of that vineyard he put off and then put off again, a long-forgotten desire that became secondary to his service to Corvo. He doesn’t regret that, he’ll never regret putting his life in Corvo Attano’s hands, but the idea of staying here is an awfully tempting one, even as a fleeting fantasy. It’s far too late and he’s far too old to change his career yet again, even if he wanted to leave Corvo, which he doesn’t.

All things considered, starting a vineyard now would just be too much hard work, even as a retirement project.

Anton Sokolov is apparently in Serkonos for his own retirement, doing whatever it is that men his age do. Painting, presumably. Going to upscale parties to taste excellent wines and sleep with beautiful women. Daud’s last information report mentioned the former Royal Physician has been seen regularly in the company of a woman – Megara or Megann or something like that – while he enjoys not working in the Jewel of the South, though for someone who is apparently not working he certain spends a lot of time in the Royal Conservatory. Just not at the moment, which is inconvenient, as Daud would have liked to ask him if he’d seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. Sokolov might be getting on, but his mind is still as sharp as Corvo’s blade.

The trouble is, Daud hears nothing; no whispers in the streets, no spiked and flowered vines curling through the cracks in the cobbled ground. He stalks the Royal Conservatory for days on end, spying on the Blind Sisters and listening to their philosophical discussions about art and history and politics and Luca Abele’s obnoxious proclamations over the city-wide speaker system which he intends to report back to Emily, as he doesn’t like the implied intentions to strip the miners of their rights. But there’s nothing uncanny or out of the ordinary, no abstract artworks to set him on edge, and certainly nothing about Delilah.

Four weeks away from Corvo now, and he feels like a fool.

The Outsider, too, remains infuriatingly silent on the matter. Daud seeks out the shrines littered across the city when he’s sick of the Conservatory – far more here than there are in Dunwall, which surprises him – but the Outsider never appears, never hauls him into the Void to give him a sneering lecture about his recent life choices. Daud is long past feeling frustrated or grief for having lost the Outsider’s attention, something he both craved and despised as a younger man; it’s a relief more than anything, to know the Leviathan doesn’t seem to care for him one way or another. He’s not interesting, not anymore – not since he saved Emily from Delilah the first time, then allowed Corvo Attano to creep into his mind and consume his every waking thought. It’s been well over eight years since Daud has stepped foot into the Void, and that suits him just fine, except for when he actually requires the Outsider’s aid.

Or perhaps, Daud thinks grimly, collecting the whalebone runes and pocketing them with a scowl, it’s because there are no whispers, no threat, no witch – just him and his paranoia, jumping at shadows, giving him an excuse to run away from the consequences when things get too difficult because old habits die hard.

_It could be something_ , Daud had said. _Or it could be nothing_.

It’s starting to look like nothing, and it’s starting to look like Corvo was right.

* * *

**early in the morning**

They’re not nightmares, not exactly, but he wishes they were. Nightmares are familiar – nightmares are second nature, the manifestation of the guilt that grows in his mind like a weed, choking the nerve centres of his brain like the vines that choked the life out of Brigmore, conjuring images of a stranger staring out of Emily Kaldwin’s eyes or of Emily Kaldwin slipping from his grasp and plummeting after Havelock to certain death. Billie Lurk, driving a knife between his shoulder blades, her heart bathed in Delilah’s poison as the witch laughs in the background. Corvo, drowning in his own lungs; Corvo, slicing Daud’s throat open and tossing him down into the murky waters of the Flooded District, the crumbling statue of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin watching him through cold, granite eyes as he bleeds. These are nightmares; these he can cope with, rationalise away.

What keeps him awake, in his rented room in a dodgy hotel in the heart of the Jewel of the South, are not bad dreams. He slips into sleep, with only a sheet to cover him and the perpetual ache in his knee throbbing lightly from walking along the cobbled streets, but instead of nightmares of Corvo dragging his blade across Daud’s throat like he should have that day twelve years ago he finds himself in a place that isn’t quite unconsciousness, and isn’t quite the Void. The world in his dreams has no time or meaning – and if it is the Void, it’s not the one he knows, because the Void that feels like a home that a deep, ignored part of him craves is soft and blue like the shallow crystal waters of the Serkonan beaches. This vast empty expanse of his mind’s eye is a swirling toxic grey like the choke dust he used to throw at enemies to confuse and paralyse them, devoid of the sound of leviathans keening in the distance, and he stumbles through this in his dreams, weary, his skin crawling and the hairs on the back of his neck standing up the way they did when he felt Billie’s eyes upon him before her betrayal, but when he peers through the swirling darkness, he can’t see a thing and when he wakes he feels as though he hasn’t slept at all.

Obviously, he’s homesick, and his age-old guilt is driving him mad.

The Outsider knew. The black-eyed bastard knew all those years ago that when Daud’s blade stilled the Empress’s heart and he delivered Emily to the Lord Regent’s men, everything would fall apart. _This time_ , he’d said, a sneer of disgust upon his face for the one of his Marked who had disappointed him the most, _you can’t just fade away into the shadows. There will be consequences._

There were consequences, like the Outsider promised, and his story would have ended twelve years ago if Corvo had made a different choice.

Perhaps Daud _should_ have died with the Outsider’s last gift – last curse. A mystery, that started with a name, and ended with a witch screaming his name in fury as he trapped her for all eternity in the Void.

He just didn’t think the consequences would linger this long in his own mind.

It’s barely five past the hour of ten at night at the end of the long, sleepless week he gave himself to make certain that what he thought was _something_ is really _nothing_. He shifts again in his creaking bed that’s just a little too small and a little too empty, a frustrated huff leaving his mouth as he tries to settle, unable to throw off the crawling sensation along his spine. He’ll feel better, he thinks, when he’s back in Dunwall, despite the shit-show that inevitably awaits him – ‘shit-show’, in this case, meaning Emily Kaldwin.

Just over five weeks ago, three days before he left Dunwall, Emily instigated a rare personal visit to his chambers. As it always does, it surprised him, though he gave no indication of it because she only came to visit him if she had a bone to pick or was feeling consolatory. He doubted very much it was the latter circumstance.

“You and Corvo are fighting,” she’d said, by way of announcing her presence.

“We’ve fought before,” Daud pointed out, and it’s true, they have, just – not badly enough to drive him to fits of sleeplessness, fearing that maybe this was one fight he couldn’t come back from.

“Not like this,” Emily insisted, which didn’t help his apprehension. “He’s so upset that I saw him steal Lady Callaghan’s jewellery right off her ears yesterday.” Daud restrained a grimace. “What did you to do to him?”

“I told him something he didn’t want to hear.”

A little bit of an understatement, Daud readily accepts this, but he didn’t think it was a good idea at the time to confess to Emily Kaldwin that he’d accused her father of being a bad Lord Protector and an even worse father, and threw Jessamine’s death – Jessamine’s murder at _Daud’s own hands_ – in his face to drive his point home.

Emily was not satisfied with the answer. She drew herself up, bristling. “If you hurt him, Daud,” she’d hissed, “I swear –”

“I’m aware of your ultimatum,” Daud replied. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t cripple my other leg.” Though Outsider knows he deserves it, and she still has the loaded pistol he gave her at the age of ten if she really wants to try. He’s not entirely sure he’ll jump out of the way.

When he turned away, he heard her start, noticing the bruise on his cheekbone that he’d almost forgotten about. It’s now long since faded but he can still feel the weight of Corvo’s hand across his face, still hear the sound of flesh striking flesh, in an attack far more intimate than mere brawling.

“That bruise on your face,” Emily had said. “He put that there.”

He brushed his fingers across the still-tender mark. “I told him something he _really_ didn’t want to hear.”

Emily crossed her arms. “Sounds to me like you bloody well deserved it, if you provoked him to that point.”

Daud smiled, though it felt more like a grimace to himself than anything else. “Perhaps.”

“Don’t let it go on too long,” Emily ordered. “I don’t care about your feelings in the matter, but I do not like seeing my father this way.”

Daud didn’t like seeing Corvo that way either. He inclined his head and said, “Empress.”

She didn’t reply. She left, turning sharply on her heel, and three days later he was on a boat to Serkonos, heart heavy and regretting that he didn’t stay in Corvo’s arms to work things out. Emily is decidedly not going to be pleased with him when he returns, given that he didn’t apologise and left Corvo to brood for five weeks, and Corvo brooding usually means Corvo pickpocketing and being generally foul-tempered, which means Emily will retaliate by acting up with the weedlord deadbeat she has the audacity to call the ‘love of her life’ and being generally inconsiderate of peoples’ feelings about the matter.

“You know the only reason Emily’s dating that ‘deadbeat’ is because you act as though it annoys you, right?” Corvo had pointed out, shortly after Emily started seeing Wyman.

“I’m aware,” Daud had replied, feeling petty. “If Emily wants to squander her time with a person unworthy of her intellect and status, then that’s up to her.” Frankly, Emily deserves to make herself miserable with Wyman after breaking Alexi’s heart, but Daud didn’t say that part.

"Oh. It _does_ bother you."

"No," Daud lied.

Corvo smiled, the expression oddly tender.

“What?”

Corvo shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just – you sound so much like each other sometimes.”

That’s not necessarily a good thing, and honestly, Daud does worry sometimes, but at least Thomas has been keeping an eye on Emily in Daud’s absence. It’s not that Daud doesn’t trust Corvo to raise his daughter the right way – he doesn’t trust Corvo to raise the _Empress_ the right way, but that’s a different matter and one he doesn’t particularly want to revisit. Daud worries because Emily seems to be perpetually caught between two extremes; the fire simmering in her heart, waiting for the right spark to set it aflame which will burn in her chest until the day it turns her heart to ash, and the almost violent desire to not be like Daud.

The latter only seems to work when he’s around to remind her of what he did. Of what he was.

Of what he still can be, if he allows himself.

He’s fond of Emily, and all too often – when she isn’t reminding him of himself – she reminds him of Billie. That… hurts, more than he cares to admit.

It was his own fault for thinking of Billie as something more than just another assassin under his command; for thinking of her the way Corvo thinks of Emily, even though he and Billie were not bound by blood but by something else he thought was just as powerful, until she proved it wasn’t. What he feels when he watches Corvo and Emily – only sometimes, when his mind wanders – is not jealousy. It’s envy, but he’s never had any delusions about inserting himself into the fold, despite Emily’s occasional verbal slips. She isn’t one of his Whalers, and Daud – like she and Corvo said – has no business trying to raise her.

Doesn’t mean he can’t try and save her from herself the way he’s been trying since the day she looked him in the eye and said _I’m going to be Empress_ , as if this will somehow make up for the way he failed Billie, wherever Billie is now.

“If you’re that curious about what she’s up to, I can tell you,” Thomas said a few years ago, but Daud shook his head. It says something about him that he’d rather not know where or what Billie is doing, but what that ‘something’ is, he isn’t entirely sure. If nothing else, he hopes Billie found those long days in the sun he once fantasised about. He has something else – someone else – to return to. The next ship to Dunwall leaves first thing on the morning of the 17th Day of the Month of Rain – tomorrow. He’ll be on it, which means he’ll be back in Dunwall before the end of the month, which gives him a few weeks to practice his apology.

So far he’s come up with “I’m sorry”.

Somehow he thinks it’ll take more than that to clear the air, because it wasn’t just the argument and the way he callously brought up Jessamine Kaldwin’s murder by his own hand, accusing Corvo of being a poor bodyguard and an even worse father. It’s how little time they have together, how infrequently they see each other outside of set work hours and schedules that they dedicate to the crown.

Hell, the last time they had sex was two months – no, _three_ months – ago; an infrequent but welcome instance where Corvo slipped into Daud’s bed sometime after midnight, too exhausted to do anything other than press his lips clumsily to Daud’s shoulder as he wrapped his arm around his waist and pressed up against him from behind, immediately falling to sleep. A few hours later, before sunrise, Daud woke to the sensation of Corvo’s morning erection pressing against the small of his back, and turned over in Corvo’s loose hold so he could lazily rock their hips together.

“Mmph,” Corvo had mumbled, blinking blearily at Daud. “What time is it.”

“Early.”

Corvo hummed with approval, closing his eyes again as he allowed Daud to move against him for a while before chuckling softly and pushing back. “Have t’go to a meeting,” he protested, deeply unconvincingly. “Stop it.”

Daud did not. “You still have a few hours,” he’d said.

“Yeah, I’m going to want more than just a few hours if you keep this up.”

That was rather the point, but Daud wasn’t going to admit that. “Excuse me?” Daud said, raising an eyebrow as he moved his hand between their bodies, pressing his palm against Corvo’s hardness through his straining pants. “You’re the one who started it.”

Corvo groaned, unable to stop himself from arching into Daud’s touch. “How many years before you let that go?” he said, breathless. Daud had smirked, and pressed their mouths together and didn’t answer, preferring instead to ease Corvo out of his pants, letting his moans wash over him like the gentle waves breaking on the shores of a Serkonan beach.

It was clumsy and more than a bit lazy, just the two of them steadily rutting against each other in a slow, easy rhythm, Daud’s hand gripping Corvo’s thigh and Corvo’s hand clenched in Daud’s hair. It wasn’t until the sun finally breached the horizon and streamed through the window that Corvo came with a low, keening moan, shuddering against him; Daud followed, trembling in Corvo’s arms as he silently came hard between their bodies, pressing his forehead against Corvo’s and breathing hard. They stayed that way for much longer, sleepily capturing each other’s mouths, until finally Corvo pulled himself away with a groan.

“You’ve got time,” Daud said, trailing his hand down the curve of Corvo’s ass as he untangled himself from Daud and the sheets.

“I can’t stay,” Corvo protested. “I have a meeting with Emily’s advisors –”

“At least shower first.”

Corvo narrowed his eyes, wary of Daud’s ulterior motives. “All right,” he agreed. “ _Just_ a quick one.”

They spent the better part of the next hour kissing ungracefully under the hot water.

“I really have to go now,” Corvo murmured against Daud’s mouth.

“Let Emily handle her own meeting.”

“I can’t, she barely read the notes last night and this is about the trade agreement with Morley –”

“Oh, what do _you_ even know about the trade agreement with Morley? Emily’s the Empress, she’ll have to figure this stuff out someday.”

“But –”

“Let her,” Daud repeated, voice husky as he backed Corvo up against the wall of the shower, letting the hot water stream over their flushed bodies, “handle it.”

It later transpired that Emily could not, in fact, handle it, and almost caused a diplomatic incident while Daud was busy wrapping Corvo’s legs around his waist to make sure he wouldn’t be able to sit down for the rest of the day. Daud didn’t apologise, and the only thing that thinking about this now has succeeded in doing is tighten his pants. Heat has gathered in his groin and subconsciously he arches his back slightly off the mattress, his painfully hard prick tenting the thin cover over him.

Daud scowls to himself, shifting in the shitty little bed which creaks under his weight again, and turns over so that his erection is digging into the mattress. He has to bite back a groan at the pressure against his hardness, and it takes a great deal of effort to stop himself from rolling his hips down like a randy teenager. It’s late and he needs rest, not his right hand, so he closes his eyes and tries to sleep, hoping the problem will go away on its own.

The problem doesn’t go away, and he can’t sleep. Five minutes of tossing and turning just makes it worse, his skin hyper-sensitive and every breath shallow as his blood heats and his pulse speeds up, the warmth in his groin refusing the quell. He mutters a soft curse to himself and relents, and with a grunt he brings a hand down between his thighs to find his hardness, palming himself through the fabric of his pants first then kicking the leggings off to free his length. He takes himself in hand and curls his fingers around his aching cock, shifting his hips and biting back a groan, whatever embarrassment he feels is washed away as the pleasure spikes through his veins.

The older he’s gotten, the longer getting off takes for both himself and Corvo, but generally neither of them mind much. It makes it inconvenient for the few times he and Corvo gave into sheer inappropriateness and rutted desperately against a corridor wall they definitely _shouldn’t_ have been rutting against, the combination of being pressed for time and the potential for being caught heightening every sensation. But usually Daud doesn’t get himself off because he’s with Corvo, and it’s just sometimes early in the mornings or late at night, maybe once or twice a week if they’re lucky and their schedules align, slowly pleasuring each other to completion. Sometimes it takes five minutes; clothes coming off urgently, buttons tearing and belts being tossed into the corner of the room; sometimes several hours, fingers slowly exploring each other’s scarred bodies that they both know so well now, just enjoying the gentle build and release as they make love, Daud’s mouth going dry as he drinks in the expression on Corvo’s face when he comes.

The night is still young and humid and the faint smell of silver dust is thick in the air, and it’s not long before a light sheen of sweat breaks out across his body, slicking his chest and gathering on his forehead as his hand moves beneath the thin sheet. He thinks of the last day he was with Corvo, that hard and desperate kiss they shared full of tension and anger, and he imagines himself giving in, putting his life in Corvo’s hands, instead of running away to investigate a ghost of his own guilt. He imagines tilting his head to deepen the kiss, his mouth moving fiercely in time with Corvo’s, fire in their blood and hungry to wipe away the cruel words and chasm between them.

He arches up into his touch, the tip of his erection dripping over his fingers, slicking his cock as he strokes himself from base to tip, bucking into his own hand as he pretends to feel the firmness of Corvo’s body pressed against his, Corvo’s answering hardness grinding into him, his left hand braced at the nape of his neck to hold him into their kiss as they groan into each other’s mouths. Daud can’t silence himself this time; he groans out loud, his hand moving faster the way Corvo does, thumbing the head of his erection he kneels over him, muscled thighs and firm shoulders, his mouth curved into a wicked smirk as he takes Daud in his palm and makes him cry out, body shuddering as he teeters on the edge, Corvo’s name on his tongue, heart hammering and that familiar agony of sweet pressure coiling in his groin –

_Daud_ , a voice hisses in the back of his mind, ice-cold tendrils of the Void creeping up his back, wrapping around his spine, and panic rips through his body a moment before release, clamping down on the pleasure and replacing it with terror, cold sweat upon his brow, Mark burning the back of his hand clenched in the sheets, the smell of rotting roses in the air and the taste of poison upon his tongue and the sound of that cold thorned laughter fading from his ears. His blade is in his grasp in an instant, breathing hard and staring around the room with his Void vision, heart pounding and ready to attack.

Nothing. There’s nothing here.

He curses roughly and tosses his blade aside with a snarl where it clatters to the floorboards, then grabs his pants to tuck himself away, still tender and sensitive, muscles pulled taut like a piano wire, tense and dissatisfied and his face burning with shame.

_Damn it._

He sits on the edge of the bed and leans forward, covering his face with his hands, the cold sweat breaking out on his body making him shiver. He’d kill for a cigarette right about now, but he stopped smoking when he became Emily Kaldwin’s Spymaster and he’s not about to start up again over something as pithy as losing an orgasm.

With a sigh he looks up and peers out the window. He should rest, but there’s no way he’ll be able to sleep for the rest of the night, so he stands and makes a decision.

One more night, he thinks, dressing swiftly and equipping his weapons, still tightly strung, his movements jerky and terse. He breathes hard, grimacing to himself. One last night spying on the Royal Conservatory and the Blind Sisters. Just to reassure himself that there’s nothing and he was wrong about Delilah, and he can put his mind to rest.

Then tomorrow, he can go home.

* * *

**postscript**

_(and up she rises)_

Nothing.

Daud rubs his eyes, exhausted and tightly wound, a heavy scowl on his face.

Fucking _nothing_.

He doesn’t know what he was expecting. Whispered conspiracies, perhaps. Secret code shared between the Blind Sisters, the whisper of Delilah’s name carried as softly as dust falling from the tomes of books in the libraries stretching from wall to wall.

It was a stupid piece of nothing that led him here – his own paranoid mind latching on to an irrelevant sentence and a meaningless footnote dated twelve years prior. Sure, it didn’t help that he’s been wary of the Oracular Order ever since Odessa White’s attempt to turn the Overseers against Corvo, but – that was different. The Blind Sisters are learned women who study the past and patterns of history to guide and advise the present and future, who carefully cultivated a reputation of receiving divine prophecies back in the days when the voice of a woman was worth barely half that of a man’s.

They’re the intellectual mind of Emily Kaldwin’s Empire, not a coven of witches plotting Delilah Copperspoon’s return.

He turns, ready to leave, only vaguely registering the conversation happening below him.

“My Lady Oracle, you wanted to see me?”

“Yes,” replies a cool, regal voice from down below – a voice that sparks an old, almost forgotten memory in the back of Daud’s mind. He frowns, lingering just a moment longer. “One of my prophecies is about to be fulfilled.”

The younger Oracle’s breath catches in her throat. “Lady Ashworth,” she says, and Daud freezes, the chill of the Void paralysing him like ice flowing through his veins. “Are you certain –?”

“Yes,” Breanna Ashworth says, and Daud tastes poison in the back of his mouth. “I’m going to Aramis Stilton’s manor. Ensure I am not disturbed for the rest of the evening. The future depends on the success of tonight.”

“Of course, Lady Ashworth.”

“That will be all, Oracle Garcia.”

The younger Oracle leaves. Daud reaches for his sleep darts, waiting for Ashworth to swing into view, but his gloved hand brushes over the hardbolts first and he stills.

If he tranquilises – or kills – the witch right now, he won’t find out what she’s planning, or what this ‘prophecy’ is or how it’s apparently being fulfilled tonight. He watches and waits, as still as a frozen lake while Ashworth gathers her things and begins to depart the Conservatory. Aramis Stilton’s manor, she said. Batista.

It could be nothing.

Or – it could be something.

He breathes hard and loads his wristbow, transversing after Ashworth. He’ll find out what's going on, and then get on the next ship back to Dunwall.

A few weeks. He intends to keep that promise.

**the end**


	4. march down that road

**open their eyes**

I did not write the speech.

I haven’t written the one planned for later, either. It was drafted by my assigned speech-writer, annotated by my advisers, approved by my parliament, and finally shoved into my hands by Mortimer Ramsey mere hours before I arrived at the Tower to address the court for the occasion of the 15th anniversary of my mother’s murder.

The throne room has been done up beautifully, of course. The chandeliers are lit, the walls have been latticed with white flowers, the same kind that mother sometimes twined through her hair when we picnicked in the garden together eating sandwiches. It is barely eight o’clock in the morning; this day will stretch on until long past nightfall. I glanced over the itinerary before arriving – there’ll be a string quartet performance at some stage, a moving eulogy written fifteen years too late by some backbencher in my parliament who met my mother once, and a feast where I will need to recite the speech that I didn’t write before finally addressing the city of Dunwall in Jessamine’s honour.

Personally, I find the pomp and ceremony sickening.

Why do we celebrate the anniversary of an assassination? It’s hardly for my sake. If I’d had any say in the matter of how my mother’s death was to be remembered, I would prefer that there be no commemoration at all. I’d prefer to keep it _private_ , the way I kept all mourning for mother private in those first few years after losing her, with only Corvo as a witness to my tears.

Jessamine Kaldwin may have been their Empress, but she was _my mother_. If I absolutely had to make a speech, it would not be filled with these stilted platitudes about her fair legacy and how her life was cut too short, and how regal she was, a true mother to the Empire. I would have written about the time she winked at me even while scolding me for climbing on my grandfather’s statue, or about the way she sleeplessly paced at night time, twisting her hands together and conversing in a low voice with my father about her fears for Dunwall during the years of the plague, or the time she agreed to let Corvo take me fishing but then had to remove a hook from my left arm because I cast off too aggressively.

All of that and more was taken away from me fifteen years ago. With one heartbeat, I was the beloved daughter of the Empress; the next, a child who just witnessed her mother’s death. So yes, I resent having to share her memory with the entire Empire of the Isles, and I resent having to remember her death and dress it up with white flowers and overly-formal speeches about how far Dunwall has come since those dark days during the plague, as though her death had meaning, or needs to be romanticised.

There was nothing romantic about my mother’s death. It was a senseless murder, committed for no reason beyond some men wanting power, and another man wanting to line his pockets with money. Daud often did like to wax poetic about how his debt to me would ‘never be repaid’, but I don’t think I saw a single coin of the blood money he received for my mother’s death returned – though, granted, Corvo probably pickpocketed it back one coin at a time.

I often wonder how much mother’s life was worth. 30,000? 40,000? More? What price do controversial Empresses go for these days? Presumably I’ll be worth more than my mother, once adjusted for inflation of course.

Now _that_ would be a speech.

“Courage,” my father tells me, perhaps noticing the consternation on my face. “I’ll be over soon.”

Not soon enough. “Sometimes I wish I could just run away from all this,” I say.

“Sometimes you do,” Corvo says pointedly. “You think I don’t know about your nights out on the rooftops?”

We all have our coping mechanisms. “You think I don’t know you pickpocket Ramsey at every chance you get?”

Corvo bites down on a coy smile, and for a moment it’s like nothing is wrong at all as we lay our roses down before Jessamine’s portrait.

It’s far from Sokolov’s finest, which I think is well within my right to say. My father once asked Anton to take me on as an apprentice to hone my art skills, the way all proud fathers who love and frame the works their daughters scribble out do. Unfortunately father’s eye for art is limited to how much particular Sokolov works are worth on the black market, and was terribly offended on my behalf when Anton said under no uncertain terms that I am a terrible artist.

The portrait was commissioned last year and was shipped over from Serkonos several months ago, kept in secrecy until today where it is now revealed to the court. Anton, I thought, specialised more in facial profile portraits rather than full-body stances. The angle at which my mother stands in his oil-painting rendition of her is accurate – regal and refined – but it isn’t _her_. It’s too far away, too detached, too impersonal. I’m disappointed he is not here today – I should have liked to tell him so myself. I’ve never needed to worry about causing offense when it comes to Anton, given that he once called one of my drawings ‘a mediocre attempt at portraiture that relies too heavily on the grotesque concept of the abstract’.

Now that I think about it, he hasn’t responded to my last letter. When was that – three months ago? More? Of course, it’s equally possible he _has_ written back, and I simply haven’t seen his letter yet. I’ve fallen behind on my correspondence. Again.

My father sighs beside me, and I look at him, more closely this time.

“You look tired, father,” I say.

This is nothing out of the ordinary. Corvo hasn’t looked anything _other_ than tired for three years, but today is worse than usual. It’s almost hard to remember him without those heavy, dark bags under his eyes, somehow perpetually bloodshot from lack of sleep. I don’t think he even bothered to shave this morning.

“I had a long night,” he gruffly replies.

He has a lot of long nights, which anyone would if they’d been working two jobs at once for three years like an idiot instead of hiring another person to ease the burden.

“Perhaps,” I suggest, “if you allow someone _else_ to take up the mantle of Spymaster –” or allow Alexi to become my Lady Protector, “– you’d sleep better.”

And if he sleeps better, he’ll be able to concentrate better, and maybe then he’ll be able to catch the one responsible for mutilating and murdering my political detractors and dressing it up as though Corvo himself were the perpetrator.

It’s a ridiculous notion, of course. The fact that anyone could believe him to be the butcher stalking the nobles now in a misguided effort to protect me from criticism is nothing short of absurd. My father didn’t leave a single body in his wake fifteen years ago, let alone a mutilated one. The nobles are probably just sick of fifteen years of having their homes looted by him and find this blame-game amusing, but the press always did get off on being libellous and disproportionate. Those who know my father know the claims are nothing more than slander, but the common people _don’t_ , and they’re the ones driving the paper sales.

Someone is framing him. Framing _us_. Ichabod Boyle was the seventh to die only a few short days ago (no huge personal loss to me, I never particularly cared for him) and the media – in all its biased glory – has been salivating for my father’s head.

This has been going on for too long and my patience is wearing thin, but my father tells me executing everyone around me would be a slight overreaction. Perhaps. The serial killer should have been caught long before now, but I look again at Corvo’s tired eyes and the slouch in his walk and his unshaven face, and I wonder if he’s even capable of doing _this_ job. I should have passed a law about the combination of titles years ago. Corvo cannot be my Lord Protector and Royal Spymaster and my father, all at the same time, and still hope to catch the Crown Killer.

I won’t ever admit to it out loud, but I do sometimes regret that Daud is gone. If only for Corvo’s sake. And mine, I suppose. I do miss having a verbal punching bag. Needling Ramsey just doesn’t give me the same sort of satisfaction.

Corvo shakes his head. “I’m sleeping fine,” he lies, and exhales loudly. “Every year I think the anniversary of Jessamine’s death will be easier, but it never is.”

Yes, well, sometimes I think some part of me died that day on the gazebo, the moment Daud’s blade pierced my mother’s body, but I try to keep the drama to myself.

My father’s face is pensive, but behind his neutral, tired gaze I see the same despair that haunts him every time he thinks I am not looking – the same expression he gets when he thinks about the man who murdered my mother.

“You’re thinking about _him_ ,” I say. “Aren’t you.”

At least he doesn’t try to lie about it. “It’s hard not to,” he admits softly. “So much was left unsaid when Jessamine died, and the way things ended between me and Daud… Gods, Emily. The week before he left – the things I said, I can never take back or apologise for. Jessamine deserved better than how I used her memory against him.” He frowns, looking down so he doesn’t have to see my mother’s painted face, forever frozen at the age she died, glaring at him. “ _He_ deserved better.”

“I’m glad you think this is an appropriate topic of conversation to bring up in front of Jessamine’s portrait on the day of the anniversary of her death,” I say tersely. “It’s as though you willingly _forget_ that he was the one who –”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Corvo says, voice as tight as a vice. “Don’t you dare. Not a single day goes by that I don’t think about Jessamine and feel her loss as deeply as the day she died. “I don’t want to fight about this, Emily. Not today.”

Daud’s disappearance and the circumstances under which it happened caused a curious change in my father. Arguments of any sort, with people he cares about, are always resolved by him by the end of the day, no matter the severity. Corvo doesn’t like the day to end without clearing the air – just in case someone he loves, someone he cares for, vanishes, and he never has the chance to apologise or make amends. He even refused to stay mad at me after he found out that I’d arranged for Anton’s portrait of Daud to go conveniently ‘missing’ last year.

I wonder where it ended up.

“Neither do I,” I admit. “I’m sorry, father.”

I didn’t mean it. Not _really_. My own issues with Daud aside, I do not like upsetting my father. Today of all days.

“I’m sorry, too,” Corvo says, and he grasps my hand. I hold it back, gripping tightly.

“I wish mother was still the Empress,” I murmur, staring at her portrait. Corvo probably wishes the same, but to his credit, he has never admitted so to my face.

“You’re still young. You’re still learning.” He turns his gaze from Jessamine’s eyes to me. The eyes aren’t quite right, I think. They’re too small, too detached. Mother’s eyes were larger, more expressive, full of life and love. “And I _know_ Jessamine would be proud of the woman you are today.”

Sometimes I’m not so sure. Jessamine never ordered anyone executed; though perhaps if she _did_ , she might still be standing here today.

He looks as though he’s about to say something else, but Alexi swiftly cuts into the conversation, appearing by Corvo’s side and glancing at me apologetically.

“Empress, Lord Attano, I’m sorry to interrupt,” Alexi says. “The High Overseer has sent a representative who wants to see you as soon as possible. He says it’s of the utmost urgency.”

“Whatever it is, it can wait until after the ceremony,” Corvo says.

“But, Lord Attano –”

“Tell him,” my father growls, “it can wait.”

“Yes, sir.” Alexi meets my eyes and smiles. “Your Majesty.”

God, that smile. “Thank you, Captain Mayhew,” I say, returning her grin, and she departs. I turn to Corvo. “What if it’s important?”

“It isn’t,” he says, rubbing his forehead. “Catherick probably just wants to cajole you into another public appearance to support the Abbey. You know how self-serving he can be.”

I do, but something I appreciate about Jasper is that he’s never exactly tried to hide it – not from me. If he wants something, he is upfront about it, inasmuch as someone in his position _can_ be. His revolution of the Abbey since Campbell’s and Magnus’s reigns has been remarkable, and I’ve barely had to lift a finger. Under his hand, the Overseers no longer patrol the streets like ravenous hounds, seeking to pounce on any scrap of prey that looks weak enough to go down after it’s been played with a bit. The witch hunts have scaled down, and young boys are no longer abducted from their homes – instead those in disadvantaged situations are approached and offered positions, and their families (if they have one) are paid a subsidy to circumvent the loss of a pair of working hands around the household.

All it cost was allowing him nigh-autonomous control and complete separation of the Abbey from the State. I don’t think that’s a bad trade-off. I really don’t understand why my father dislikes him, aside from the fact that Jasper Catherick always seems to know what’s going on at any given moment and that Daud was rather partial towards the High Overseer when he was still around.

Personally, I think it’s jealousy on Corvo’s part.

“Your Majesty,” Ramsey says as I take my place on the throne. “Before we begin the day’s observances we have an unexpected visitor.”

* * *

**'til they're numb**

I often wonder what my life would have been like if my mother had not died. The first difference would be that I’d have maintained my innocence, just a little bit longer. It’s not that I was a naïve or incredibly sheltered child; I was aware of the plague and the damage it was causing, and the sleepless nights where mother would just pace her office in despair for the suffering of her beloved people. I knew the names of my mother’s parliamentary ministers, some of their roles, who to go to if I had a certain question about something. I knew that one day, I would have to do what mother did – rule an Empire whose capital cities I could barely identify on a map.

I suppose if mother hadn’t died fifteen years ago today, I’d have learned more from her kindness, her grace, her elegance. I recall it so sharply – her gentle smile, the cheeky wink she gave me even as she scolded me, the tender way she would plait my hair – but I am almost incapable of replicating her personality. Every time I try, I find myself irritable, tense, as though putting on a mask that does not fit and mocks her face to add insult to the injury.

I was an inattentive child when it came to my lessons. The only ones I truly paid attention to where Anton’s natural philosophy and history lectures, which were always filled with wild and grossly inappropriate stories about days from his youth, his adventures, and anything that involved pirate ships and battles. But that didn’t mean I was an infantile ten-year-old; I was just a ten-year-old who lived in a palace, treated to the most normal childhood a future Empress could expect to receive, with far more money and servants than any other in the Empire.

Obscene, really. Why does circumstance of birth make such a difference to the way children are brought into this world and experience it? At some point or another, no matter the privilege, we all learn what the world is really like: cruel and merciless and very, very unkind to little girls.

My mother was, in her own way, innocent. I lost my innocence the day she died, _because_ of hers. I thought I’d long run out of it. It’s curious how there’s always just that little bit more left to lose.

“If you really are my mother’s sister,” I had bitten out to the woman strutting before my throne, “then you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

In the holding cells, for example. Or Coldridge. The asylum would have been delighted to admit her and stick her in the wing that holds all the other so-called long-lost-Kaldwin heirs.

Perhaps if my mother was still alive, she could have refuted the madwoman’s claims. Perhaps my father would not have been immobilised and had his Mark torn from his soul, rendering him helpless before the witch. Perhaps I wouldn’t have had to have watched Corvo cast in cold marble, frozen with his arms outstretched and an expression of agony upon his face, in a last desperate attempt to protect me.

I certainly wouldn’t be standing here with my father’s blade, the hilt stained with Alexi’s blood, through Mortimer Ramsey’s ribs, my other hand clenched in his hair to drive his face against the safe holding the royal reserves.

Despite my carefully cultivated reputation as a “Murder Empress”, I have never actually killed a person with my own two hands before today. I have ordered executions, yes – Hiram Burrows, several nobles who plotted a coup against me in the early days of my reign. I would have ordered the deaths of the former High Overseer and Oracle, if Daud had not implied that he’d have done the same, and the last thing I ever wanted to do was emulate _him_ in any way. I certainly felt _ready_ to kill Daud on multiple occasions, including but not limited to the day I found him and my father together in a _highly_ non-professional embrace.

My father taught me how to hold someone in a Tyvian chokehold. He taught me how to run across the rooftops, sneak up on a man and disarm him, how to aim a crossbow and gun, how to wield a blade, and the movements and strength and speed necessary to kill in self-defence. A last resort.

It was Daud who taught me how to murder.

Ramsey’s blood streams down the hilt of the blade and across my hands, hot and sticky and rich with the smell of iron. My arm shakes from holding his entire weight up with the blade that runs through his body from behind, the tip jutting out through his chest.

“Did you enjoy my safe room, _Mortimer?_ ” I hiss in his ear, and he chokes as I twist the blade sharply in his lungs.

“Hnngh—” he gurgles, and I yank the sword out, allowing his shuddering body to hit the floor. The smell of urine starts to sting the air as he loses control of his bowels and bladder, the way dying people do.

“That,” I snarl, stepping on the hand that reaches out for his fallen pistol, crushing his fingers beneath the heel of my boot, “was for Alexi.”

He dies with as much dignity as he possessed when he lived – which is to say, none at all.

* * *

There is little doubt at this stage that the Crown Killer murders were orchestrated by Delilah to set the stage for this coup, but I have neither time nor the facilities to think about it in greater detail at this moment. There will be time, later, once I’ve spoken with the ship captain and I’ve had time to sit down and gather my wits about me, and somehow figure out how my father – my Lord Protector and Spymaster – somehow _missed_ Ramsey’s betrayal, _missed_ an entire coup being arranged, right beneath his nose.

Beneath _my_ nose.

How long has this coup been in the works for? How far down the line does this conspiracy go? I don’t know who else in this city is no longer loyal to me. My instincts were right – I _should_ have just had everyone around me executed, overreaction be damned. Ramsey turned my guards against me; the Duke of Serkonos has led my father’s entire _homeland_ against me. Whatever allies I think I have in Dunwall will be useless to me now.

My only chance for survival is to leave.

I gather what I can – my signet ring off Ramsey’s body (whose corpse I spit on for good measure), a few vials of health elixir, the coin pouches my father hid away like a magpie hoarding its findings, the telescope he gifted me on my eighteenth birthday – and eventually my fingers brush across the gun.

When I was ten years old, the assassin Daud saved me from almost certain death, and then went a step further. He knelt before me, unlatched his pistol from its holster around his waist, and showed it to me. “Do you know how to use one of these?” he’d asked.

Of course I didn’t know how to use it, but I remember glancing at it and thinking there couldn’t be anything that hard about pointing the gun and squeezing the trigger. “Yes,” I’d replied, and without a second of hesitation, he passed the pistol over, handle first. It wasn’t the most state-of-the-art weapon then and it’s certainly aged now, but Piero – before he and Anton fought and parted ways – modified it as the years went on, adding bullet capacity and increasing the reload speed. Though old, it is a fine weapon and its quality now supersedes anything my Royal Guard or the City Watch possesses, and since the day Daud gave it to me, it has never left my person for any reason.

Except when it’s the anniversary of my mother’s death.

I grimace, holster the weapon, and cast one final glance around the room that has been my sanctuary for years. So many memories in this place. Memories of curling up in the corner on a pile of pillows, weeping because I missed Jessamine; memories of Corvo sitting beside me, holding me while we wept together. Wyman, strewn naked across the bed, cowering in fear of my father’s and Daud’s wrath. Corvo splashing glasses of water in my face to sober me up.

Alexi, kissing me softly on that one night we both broke our promise to never again mix pleasure with duty.

My days of getting high with Wyman are over now. A coup is as good an excuse as any to terminate a dead-end relationship, I suppose – all those years spent wasted with a deadbeat noble (father’s description) out of spite than appreciating what I had with Alexi.

It’s not often I’m disgusted with myself, but this is one of those times.

I lock the door behind me and make my way out to the rooftops, the way my father ingrained in me. Over the balcony, across the piping, around the Dunwall Courier building, up the metal grafts, and wait for the train to pass below so I can jump down on to it, where it will whisk me through the city to the docks. Away from the palace. Away from Dunwall. Away from my father, trapped in marble.

Away from _Alexi._

“Go, Emily,” she’d pleaded, the blade that belonged to my Lord Protector being pressed into my hand by the woman who should have been my Lady Protector. She had grimaced, her face pale as her blood ran from the wound in her gut, staining her uniform and the sword and the floor that she’d painstakingly dragged herself across just for the chance to help me. “Find the ship.”

“I can’t leave you,” I’d gasped.

Even dying she managed to smile. “What are you going to do?” she’d whispered. “Carry me all the way to the boat?”

“I will if I damn well have to!”

Alexi shook her head. “Emily,” she’d whispered, still smiling. “It’s too late. Save your sorry royal behind. For me.”

The laugh I released was more a sob than anything else. “Alexi, I’m sorry,” I’d whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.” I pressed a kiss to her cool, clammy cheek.

I didn’t want the last image of Alexi I hold to be the life leaving her, the light fading from her vibrant eyes. So I squeezed her hand and she squeezed back, and I stood – leaving her behind, her breaths slowing, to follow Ramsey into my safe room to save my own sorry royal behind.

_Don’t fucking cry_.

I can grieve later. I will not fail her by falling apart now. She gave me that chance to escape – so I will live. For her.

I breathe hard and steel myself as I begin to climb over the railing, I spot something – some _one_ – moving to my right. I draw my father’s sword, backing up against the balcony edge. “Stay back!”

I’ve killed a man once already today – the blade in my hand aches to make it two.

My would-be assailant holds up his hands and steps back. “Wait, Empress – I’m a friend.”

I have trouble believing that. The only friends an Empress has are the ones she chooses for herself. One of the few people in this world I have been able to call a friend is my brave, kind, beautiful Alexi, who used her last breath to help me.

Before I can lunge in pre-emptive defence, I realise the man wears the mask of an Overseer. He pushes it up to reveal his face, and I take a step back, lowering the sword.

“I know you,” I realise, vaguely recalling his face around the palace when I was a child, shortly after being restored to my throne.

“My name is Feodor, Empress,” the Overseer says, inclining his head. “I was one of Daud’s agents back in the day.”

“You became an Overseer?” I ask dubiously.

Feodor smiles. “Indeed. I found the faith, Empress.”

I highly doubt that. More like Daud stationed him in the Abbey to spy on the High Overseer.

“How did you find me?” I demand.

“This the back entrance to your safe room, isn’t it?” Feodor says. “The new administration has already noticed you’re missing.”

At the same time as he says this, a loudspeaker announcement blasts through the city, something about _all hail our new Empress, Delilah Kaldwin_ and _Emily Attano is wanted for treason, it is a crime to aid and abet a fugitive_ , amongst other charming decrees.

Feodor draws a slip of paper from his pocket, handing it to me. “The High Overseer sent me to give you this.”

I take it cautiously, waiting for him to make a sudden move, or betray me, but he doesn’t – merely waits for me to take the paper and unfurl it to glance at the familiar handwriting.

_Empress –_

_Coup underway. Get out of Dunwall. Must ensure Abbey & Oracular Order are not compromised before acting. Trust no one. Keep safe._

_J.C._

I crush the note in my fist, hands still red and sticky with Ramsey’s blood, and I clench my eyes shut. “He was trying to warn me and my father this morning,” I say.

“Yes, my Lady.”

And my father turned his messenger away. “How did he know?”

“High Overseer Catherick _didn’t_ know, my Lady,” Feodor replies, pulling the mask back over his face now. “We only learned of it this morning – a warning came from an acquaintance, barely half an hour before it happened. We’re sorry we couldn’t act faster.”

I close my eyes again. Act _faster?_ It’s not the Overseers’ responsibilities to act as bodyguards and a spy network for the throne. It was my father’s job to know of these things long in advance and protect me from them, and yet Jasper bloody Catherick _still_ managed to do a better job than Corvo.

Oh. _Corvo._

My chest aches with a sharp pain, one I haven’t felt in fifteen years to the day. Is this what it was like for Corvo when he watched me get stolen away by Daud’s men? How helpless he felt when he held my mother in his arms as she died? It occurs to me there is some sick irony about all of this – perhaps which is what the madwoman Delilah was aiming for. What better day to stage a coup than the day commemorating Jessamine Kaldwin’s death, the day Daud killed her? This is the second time my life has come crashing down around me, and my mother and Daud always seems to be at the heart of it, the catalysts for some new tragedy.

“You should make haste, Majesty,” Feodor says. “Is there somewhere I can escort you to?”

The only way for me to free Corvo from his marble prison – to _stop Delilah_ – is to leave Dunwall.

To find out how all of this _happened_.

I breathe in and open my eyes, and make a decision. “No,” I say. “Tell Jasper I’ll be fine, and that I’ll be in touch soon.” I cast my gaze across the rooftops across to the docks, where the ship – the _Dreadful Wale_ – awaits. “I know where I need to go.”

* * *

**black as pitch**

The _Dreadful Wale_ creaks and groans like an old crone rising from her bed each morning, joints stiff and back cracking. It has a particular smell to it – a faint scent of fish and steel, salt water and cigarette smoke, and a certain outlawed herb that lingers in the air and leaves a pale, familiar aftertaste in my mouth – and the air is never quite right, alternating between steamy and humid from the churning of the engines to freezing cold because too many windows have been left open to counteract the heat.

The two people on board Meagan Foster’s vessel that came to my aid have assured me that the ship is entirely seaworthy, despite its age and the troubling noises that emanate from the boiler room at night. Normally I would not take the word of the captain who has to hit the engines with a spanner every now and then to keep them running – all captains tend to love their vessels to the point of blindness when it comes to their flaws and dangers – but if the man in a wheelchair who once worked for my Spymaster and has since made this ship his home for the last three years says it’s safe enough, I am inclined to believe him.

The cabin room I wake up in is _not_ in the _Dreadful Wale_.

I can tell immediately from the temperature. Neither humid nor freezing, but an ancient, aching _coolness_ , and the taste of dust and ash like the soot from a fireplace the morning after its flames died lingers on my tongue. The constant ticking and creaking sounds that fill every gap of sound are gone, replaced instead by dead silence.

Absurdly, my first instinct is that I’ve been abducted. Yes, Empress, I think. Someone has gone to the trouble recreating your ship cabin and stolen you from the belly of a vessel in the middle of the ocean.

Wait. That’s _exactly_ what has happened.

As I rise, I realise the sound around me is not silence, not completely. In the distance I hear a keening, mellow sound. It takes me a while to place this noise, until finally I recognise it as song of the leviathans themselves, deep and gentle and more beautiful than I think I’ve ever heard it in my entire life.

Once as a child – I must have been five, or even six – I visited a slaughterhouse with my mother on state business. I cannot remember the purpose of the visit – something about granting whaling rights to some company or another – but I do remember hearing a whale’s moans of death, and before I knew it, I was in tears, sobbing hysterically and blubbering, begging them to stop hurting the poor whale. I fled the meeting room before any of mother’s guards could stop me, tears blinding my eyes, and I hid in a dark, quiet corner where I could block out the pained cries of that poor, tortured creature whose oil would power the palace.

Corvo found me soon afterwards and lifted me into his arms, holding my head against his shoulder so that I would not have to see or hear the lonely, suffering creature, but I still heard its song of agony in my mind long after that visit.

I never knew whales could sing of something other than their pain.

As I step across the cold granite stones into this endless expanse of black and grey ash, my bare feet kicking up small clouds of silver dust, the breath catches in my chest.

I don’t have to ask where I am or what this place is. I somehow already _know_. This is the Void. The place of the Overseers’ nightmares, a realm of madness and insanity.

I thought it’d be prettier, frankly.

Something is moving closer to me. Something is _watching_. My hand instinctively falls to my waist to reach for the pistol but my hand closes around thin air.

“It would not be the first time someone aimed that very weapon at me,” murmurs a voice, far too sensual for the occasion. Or perhaps that’s his default tone. “I do hope you’ll be more agreeable than its former owner.”

I start, and a being both acutely human and as foreign as a creature deep at the bottom of the ocean between the Isles and Pandyssia appears before me in a rush of ash and swirling tendrils of the Void, appearing as a young man; tall and elegant, his movements as smooth as a stream.

The Leviathan himself.

I grimace. What exactly did I think I was going to do? _Shoot_ the Outsider? “You,” I say.

The Outsider tilts his head. “Empress Emily Kaldwin,” he says, my name a song on his lips.

I’ve heard Corvo mention him, once, or twice. He described him as a friend – an impartial observer, curious about the world and the potential of people.

Daud called him a bastard.

“We’ve… met,” I realise, a long-forgotten memory of his pitch-black eyes, invading my restless dreams when I was scared and alone and curled up in a corner of the prison I called a room in the Golden Cat, filtering back like sand through the pinched stem of an hourglass.

“Once,” he agrees, tone wry. “Or twice. I never expected us to meet again after you were rescued by a killer in a strange mask.”

“My father is no killer.”

The Outsider tilts his head, and then I think of the man on the lighthouse with trembling hands and a fraying red jacket, removing the mask that belonged to my father only to reveal the face of the monster who drove a whaling blade through my mother’s chest.

I scowl.

The corner of the Outsider’s mouth curves into a smile, as though he knows exactly what just went through my mind.

“I thought _that_ was the end of the excitement.”

“I’m pleased the tragic downfalls of my life have been a source of entertainment to you.”

He laughs. “Not many things these days take me by surprise, Empress. But _you_ certainly have, and Delilah and the Duke are rather the flies in the ointment, aren’t they?”

I narrow my eyes. “Delilah,” I realise, thinking of the way she rendered my father immobile and stripped the Mark from the back of his left hand, as though severing his soul itself from the Void. “She’s one of yours, isn’t she? Like Corvo, and Daud.”

“Curious how the consequences of certain actions still reverberate today,” the Outsider says cryptically. “Delilah has haunted your steps for far longer than you know.”

“I worked out that coups take longer than a week to organise on my own, thanks.”

“What a pity you didn’t have a Spymaster who could have gathered the necessary information.”

Even dead and gone, Daud continues to be a disaster of a human being who ruins my life.

“Fifteen years ago I stood before Corvo as I stand before you now,” the Outsider says, pacing before me. “I wanted to know what happened when an honourable man’s life was taken away and his face thrust down in the mud; whether he would use the powers I gave him to wreak revenge and bleed Dunwall dry in his quest to save you, or if he would find another way.”

We both know the answer to that.

“This is the moment that changed him,” the Outsider says. “Now, Emily, it’s your turn.” He tilts his head. “I wonder. How many of your own subjects are you ready to slaughter, and what are you willing to become?”

Wait. He’s offering me –

_Oh._

When I was a girl, I would sometimes trace the back of Corvo’s left hand before Daud called him a “public execution waiting to happen” and forced him to cover it. The Mark of the Outsider was burned there into his skin, a peculiar pattern that I recall every angle and curve of. This, I remember thinking, was the sign of a heretic – a witch, a heathen, someone who violated the Strictures and slit rats open to paint their bodies with blood to dance under the full moon at midnight.

I’m pretty sure the most my father ever did with rats was possess them and occasionally eat them until both Daud and I told him it was disgusting on separate instances. How he avoided the plague, I really have no idea. But the symbol to me was not one of heresy or evil; it was the symbol of my hero, my saviour, my father who had found and rescued me. It gifted him with strange abilities that I could never hope to understand – abilities my father said I should not wish for, even though I did. What child who had witnessed her father vanish from one spot and appear instantly in another the next _wouldn’t_ wish for those powers? I used to spend my meetings with ministers and advisers kicking my legs under the table and gazing off into the distance, imagining myself disappearing in front of them and reappearing up in the rafters, laughing at them from above while they cried out in horror at seeing their Empress pull a vanishing act.

Jasper mightn’t have executed me for pulling a stunt like that, but _someone_ certainly would have ended up doing so.

The Mark that Daud and Corvo shared is not a thing to be trifled with. I am not a bored thirteen-year-old girl anymore, wanting the chance to halt time for a few seconds to ink my Prime Minister’s face with a false moustache.

What I am is a deposed Empress whose father was stripped of his Mark and trapped in marble, and Delilah has every advantage right now. These last two weeks at sea have given me time to think, on the occasions I sit down and allow it of myself. I don’t get much further beyond the seething rage igniting my chest at the thought of Delilah strutting about my throne, calling herself Empress, sitting in my throne that belonged to my mother before me. Or much further than the grief and fury that fills a gaping wound in my heart from the way I’d grasped Alexi’s shoulder, meeting her pained eyes. The salt air sometimes isn’t enough to overpower the smell of Alexi’s blood on my hands, which I can still feel no matter how thoroughly I scrub the skin. A constant reminder of my failure of her.

And a constant reminder of how _good_ it felt to skewer Mortimer Ramsey on the sharp end of my blade.

My heart surges, and I clench my left fist. “Why don’t we find out together?”

The Outsider’s mouth curves into a curious smile, and my left hand begins to scald. I hiss as something sears into my flesh like a brand of hot iron, yet somehow is as cold as ice glaciers of Pandyssia at the same time. I feel as though I’m standing on the edge of… _something_. Teetering on the edge of a cliff, the rocks beneath my feet crumbling with every step, a balancing act between life and death on the precipice of history. Is this how my father felt, the day the Outsider burned his Mark on to his hand? How Daud felt, when the Outsider appeared to him and called him _special?_

I clench my fist again, staring at the Mark that has been burned on to the back of my left hand.

It’s as beautiful as the one on Corvo’s hand, and on Daud’s, on the rare occasions he would take off his leather gloves.

“You gave this to Delilah, too,” I say, only barely accusatory, unable to draw my gaze from it.

“There’s no one quite like her,” the Outsider says. “I watched her claw herself up from the filth until she was in a position to steal from the wisest scholars in the Empire. I saw her slit a man’s throat for a pair of shoes, and gazed on as she painted some of the most brilliant portraits of the age, all in the same year. Survival and ambition, art and magic, with a cunning that makes sycophants of those around her.” His face is an unreadable canvas; a scowl of disgust one second, a breathless expression of admiration the next. _Fascinating_ , he once called my father, and this I understand. “And all of it leading to what you saw at Dunwall Tower.”

I wonder how long it took her to lose the Outsider’s favour.

I bristle. “You’ve Marked two people now who have brought my life crashing down around me,” I say. “You’re not a very good judge of character, are you?”

He smiles, but does not refute this. “Delilah’s playing the long game, and now she’s an Empress.” He vanishes, and appears beside me now, so close I can feel the coolness emanating from his presence. When he speaks, his voice is a conspiring whisper. “But she played dirty. It’s only fair if I level the playing field.”

Daud taught me not to trust anything that advertised itself as ‘fair’. Nothing is _fair_ in this world. If things were fair, Hiram Burrows would not have hired an assassin to kill my mother; if things were fair my father would not have endured six brutal months in Coldridge. If things were fair, I wouldn’t have had to have walked in on my father and Daud sexually assaulting each other in a corridor when I was fifteen years old, and if things were _fair_ I’d still have my damn throne.

But gods, I suppose, don’t play by the rules of the mortal world.

What he offers me is a heart. A _human_ heart, thudding and vibrating in my hands, a hideous contraption of dead flesh and steel and it feels… _familiar_.

**_I… know you,_** it whispers, channelling the Void itself, and my fingers grip it tightly, the wires cutting into my skin.

That voice. I _know_ that voice. A sad melody I haven’t heard since –

Oh.

Oh, _god_.

**_Do you remember?_** It says, and I feel myself trembling. ** _It’s been so long. And you’ve been through so much. My daughter. My…_**

She sighs.

**_…My darling Emily._ **

“Mother?” I whisper.

No, I realise numbly, as the monstrosity beats in my grasp. This isn’t Jessamine Kaldwin. This is only the last of her essence, trapped in this – _cage_.

**_If only I could reach across this great expanse and take you into my arms one last time._ **

She falls silent and I stare at it, feeling rather than seeing the Outsider appear behind me.

“Why did you do this to her?” I whisper, clutching the thing of dead flesh and metal and wire, still beating feebly in my hands.

“Why assume it was without consent?” the Outsider says.

This is something my mother agreed to? Something she _wanted?_ “This is a living death,” I say, holding the pounding thing, caught somewhere between disgust and wanting to clutch it to my chest and never let go. I face him, meeting those pitch black eyes that bore deeper into my soul than anyone else’s I’ve ever met. “This is a _curse_.”

“And my gift to you,” the Outsider says.

Now, I’ve received questionable gifts from potential suitors before – I was once gifted a nude silvergraph of Wyman suggestively holding a whalebone dildo for my last birthday – but no one has ever given me the actual, beating heart of my dead mother.

“You could have asked me to dinner instead,” I say, even as I cannot bear to let the last echo of my mother go. “It would have been far less creepy.”

“Perhaps another time,” he says, a smirk to his voice.

I stare down at my mother’s heart again, my own matching it beat for beat. “Thank you,” I whisper.

The Outsider inclines his head again, in a gesture that is almost a bow. “I will be watching you with _great_ interest… Empress Emily Kaldwin.”

My name dances on his tongue. I suppose there’s some comfort in the fact that the god of the Void still considers me the rightful ruler of the Isles. And then I feel as though I am plummeting in a dream, the way one falls asleep too quickly and the body thinks it has slipped from the top of a cliff, or off a ladder, or simply has missed a step on a dark and winding staircase, a lurch behind the gut and a split second of terror.

I wake with a start, jerking hard in the bunk of my bed aboard the _Dreadful Wale_ , the smell of fish and saltwater and steel filling the air, and the sweet melodies of whales keening in the background has vanished. My forehead is damp with cold sweat and in the inside pocket of my jacket I feel my mother’s Heart beating softly against my own, both of this world and hidden in the other. The back of my hand stings like a bitch, and flaring like hot iron against my skin – _not a dream, not a dream, this is not a dream this is_ real – burns the Mark of the Outsider himself.

Daud was right, I realise, inordinately pissed off. The Outsider _is_ a bastard.

* * *

**pittance for pay**

I don’t know what to make of Meagan Foster.

A friend of Anton’s; an acquaintance of Thomas’s; the captain of a ship whose seaworthiness is questionable at best; her face maimed and right arm missing from the elbow down after attempting to reach Aramis Stilton through a veritable legion of guards. I don’t know her from a bar of soap, I don’t know her motives. She speaks little and rarely about herself, and in my experience people who don’t have much to say are hiding something.

It doesn’t help that she often averts her gaze when I try to meet her eyes.

I wondered, at first, if she was one of Daud’s Whalers – but I made a point of learning all the names of his men after Rulfio’s death, even the ones that left his service and joined the City Watch, like Jenkins and Aedan and Anthony, or the Royal Guard like Kieron and Devon. The name Meagan Foster was not amongst any of the lists.

She is a mystery. I dislike mysteries, but my options at this stage are limited. She and Thomas were some of the only ones in Dunwall to step up and aid me; she’s earned the right to keep her secrets.

For now.

When I emerge from my cabin, Thomas is there outside. His eyes flick down to my left hand, which I have covered in a black band like the one my father wore. Thomas’s lips quirk knowingly, but he says nothing about it.

Seeing Thomas again for the first time in three years, two weeks ago when I hauled myself out of the river and on to the deck of the _Dreadful Wale_ , was a shock. It’s not that we were friends, or anything more than passing acquaintances, and three years have not changed him much. He looks more tired, grimmer. I remember him as a younger man, so undyingly loyal to Daud who he treated as a father more than a leader, smiling more easily and slipping as silently as a shadow down the corridors, vanishing for days at time to gather the information that would fill the reports from Daud that I would rarely read. I caught him spying on me a few times – ‘keeping watch’, was the explanation Daud provided when I dug a knife into his throat and demanded he tell his men to stop following me – but I have to wonder now if that was part of the training they were giving me without my conscious knowledge or without directly engaging me in lessons.

For someone so light on his feet and so silent at night, it was cruel to see him rendered disabled in the manner he had been – bruised and battered and breathing for a tube for weeks before waking to find himself unable to walk, confined to a wheelchair, hindered by the simplest things such as staircases and uneven surfaces. I was glad when he left the service of the palace after Daud’s disappearance. It was without ceremony and without sentiment; his loyalty was never to me, and he never cared for my approval.

So no, no one could consider us friends. But we had Daud in common, which sometimes is enough for mutual respect. That he cared enough to come back to try and warn me about the coup by passing a message through Feodor and the Overseers, means… something.

“Good, you’re up,” Thomas says, wheeling forward in the chair that has Anton’s obvious technical-genius touch upon it. “Meagan’s waiting for you.”

Meagan’s briefing is swift and to the point, like everything else about her. She doesn’t waste time on platitudes or unnecessary prose. She tells me what I need to know in a quick and concise manner, which reminds me sharply of the way Daud used to deliver his reports. Saving Anton is our first point of order; he was Delilah’s teacher, once. He’s the only one who can tell me about her – who she is, where she came from, and how to take her down. Without Anton, we can’t form a cohesive plan against Delilah, and he was last seen being taken to Addermire Institute. Dr Alexandria Hypatia is the best lead we have – the only person who might be willing to help me.

“How did you say you knew Meagan again?” I ask Thomas, watching her head up the stairs to prepare the skiff.

“We’re old friends,” Thomas replies.

If she was one of Daud’s Whalers, they’d have both said so. “Hmm.”

“You can trust her,” Thomas assures me, but Daud taught me something different that day on Kingsparrow Island, fifteen years ago. _You are the only person you can ever trust, and no one else_ , he'd said. _Remember that. It'll save your life one day_.

Corvo passed along the reports of corruption, violence on the streets. Usually the local authorities deal with that sort of stuff – the discontent, the usual anti-Imperial propaganda.

I didn’t think much of it. Trusted the Duke would handle things.

I wonder what Daud would think of me now.

“Before you head ashore, there’s something you need to hear before,” Thomas says, grimacing. “ _Deserve_ to hear, I guess.”

“What is it? Does it have to do with Delilah?”

“Something like that.” He produces from his inside jacket pocket an audiograph card – an old one – and passes it over. “Listen to it first. Then I’ll explain what I can.”

* * *

“ _No one will ever know exactly what it took to save Emily Kaldwin from a living death as Delilah’s puppet_ ,” says a familiar, rough voice, as though he’d smoked half his life away on cigarettes even though I never once saw him put one between his lips. _“No one except the Outsider, who watches everything and thinks his own dark thoughts and speaks to few in any generation_.”

He sounds tired in this recording; exhausted, as though drained of everything he was. I wonder when he made this. Before Corvo came to the Flooded District with the intention of killing him? After he saved me on Kingsparrow Island?

“ _I’ve learned that our choices always matter to someone, somewhere. And sooner or later, in ways we can’t always fathom, the consequences come back to us. I came from Serkonos to Dunwall as a boy, made my living as a killer, one of the few who’ve heard the Outsider’s voice. I murdered an Empress, but saved her daughter, who will one day rule the Empire. Those were my choices._ ”

A long pause, a heavy breath, and finally:

“ _I’m ready for what comes._ ”

The audiograph player clicks and ends.

It’s something of a struggle to recall the last thing I ever said to Daud, or the last thing he ever said to me, before he disappeared and broke my father’s heart and left me without a Spymaster who could have prevented all of this from happening. It filters back now, as though unlocked by the sound of his voice. It was the day before he left. I rarely visited him upstairs in the attic he called a home, aside from that one time in the week following the death of his man Rulfio at the hands of the Overseers. Every other time I required a discussion, I called him down to me – made him walk, even on his injured knee – down to my office.

But the fight he had with Corvo was different from their usual tiffs about uniforms and the way the reports were structured and why Jasper Catherick was being allowed to station an Overseer as a palace liaison. I usually found their arguments hilarious and derived a deep, abiding satisfaction from seeing Daud pissed off; their last was equally hilarious until I realised that it was worse than usual and my father was genuinely, deeply _upset_. He didn’t smile at my jokes, he snapped at me for being late to my meetings. So I marched myself upstairs to the attic to confront Daud about it directly.

“You and Corvo are fighting.”

If he was surprised to see me, he gave no indication. “We’ve fought before,” Daud pointed out.

“Not like this,” I insisted. “He’s so upset that I saw him steal Lady Callaghan’s jewellery right off her ears yesterday. What did you to do to him?”

“I told him something he didn’t want to hear.”

I think it was a little more than that, considering the expression of sheer grief I’d seen on Corvo’s face. I’d bristled, drawing myself up. “If you hurt him, Daud,” I’d hissed, “I swear –”

“I’m aware of your ultimatum,” Daud replied. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t cripple my other leg.”

He turned his head, and I frowned. “That bruise on your face,” I said, noticing the mark. “He put that there.”

Daud brushed his fingers across the splotchy bruise on his left cheekbone, as though he’d forgotten it was there. “I told him something he _really_ didn’t want to hear.”

I crossed my arms. “Sounds to me like you bloody well deserved it, if you provoked him to that point.”

Daud smiled, though the expression was… painfully sad. “Perhaps.”

Corvo made no secret of the fact that he regretted the way things ended between him and Daud, whether or not the argument was his fault. He always made it seem as though he and he alone was in the wrong – always going on about the things he said, things that he couldn’t take back. Corvo never told me what Daud said to make him react that way. It must have been bad, but surely not bad enough for him to go all the way to Serkonos for the sole purpose of impregnating a witch who tried to possess me once.

I _hope_.

“Don’t let it go on too long,” I remember I’d ordered. “I don’t care about your feelings in the matter, but I do not like seeing my father this way.”

Daud inclined his head and said, “Empress,” and I left.

And… that was it. Three days later he left for Serkonos. He didn’t sort out the argument with Corvo. Corvo’s heart broke, and I never saw him again.

Corvo regrets the way things ended between him and Daud, and I suppose I… _almost_ understand where he’s coming from. Some closure, if nothing else, would have been appreciated, but Daud’s life ended the way he lived it: as a colossal fuck-up. My chest aches as I pull the audiograph card out from the machine and stare at Daud’s – confession? Intended last words? I don’t know. But it stirs a feeling in me that I’m not especially fond of.

He didn’t even say _goodbye_.

“You’ve listened to it, then?” Thomas says, when I step out onto the deck where he has used Anton’s pulley system to winch himself and his chair up from the hold.

“He knew about Delilah,” I say. “All this time, and he never said a word about her.”

Thomas rolls his chair forward, just a little. “He thought she was gone.”

I run the audiograph between my hands, my fingers catching in the grooves. “What did he mean by a living death as her puppet?”

“After the hit on the Empress –”

“You mean after he _killed my mother_ –”

“Yes, after that,” Thomas says, ever patient.

Why is it so easy to forget that Thomas was part of that, too? He may not have held the blade but he was there that day, helped Daud gather information, restrained my father, and _unlike_ Daud, has never shown remorse or any particular loyalty to me. To this day I wonder which one of Daud’s Whalers was the one who grabbed me and yanked me away from Jessamine. No one ever came forward to confess.

“The Outsider offered him a chance to – make amends, I suppose,” Thomas explains. “He gave Daud a name. Delilah’s name. We uncovered a plot. She was planning on possessing you – _becoming_ you, stealing your life and everything that you are so she could be Empress one day, in your body. Instead of allowing her to complete the ritual, Daud trapped her in a painting of the Void.”

It’s almost too absurd, as though Thomas truly expects me to believe that fifteen years ago a witch was trying to possess me, as though _anyone_ , no matter how deranged, would willingly go through puberty twice.

And now I’m hearing that Daud saved me _before_ halting my fall from that lighthouse.

Thomas gazes at me, perhaps waiting for me to express gratitude to Daud’s memory, thanking him posthumously for saving my life. I do not; Daud had more than a decade to tell me himself if he wanted praise or recognition for it. He could have saved my life a hundred times over – _did_ save my life a hundred times over – and all it did was repay the debt, which is not the same as cleaning the slate or washing his hands of my mother’s blood.

Neither of us ever pretended otherwise.

“He didn’t think to kill her?” I say instead, ire rising, and I toss the audiograph card at Thomas who catches it deftly. “Why spare _her_ life when he had no trouble murdering my mother not six months prior?”

“You know why,” Thomas says. “The Empress’s death changed him.”

“I’m familiar with his crisis of conscience,” I mutter in disgust. “What a pity it meant he screwed me over _twice_.”

“What do you _want_ from him, Empress?” Thomas says helplessly, as I storm off towards the skiff, using the side of the boat that does not have a ramp equipped so I can leave him and his wheelchair stranded at the bottom of a short staircase. “He’s been gone three years. He’s not _here_ for you to be angry at him anymore. He was trying to be a better person and he spent _twelve goddamn years_ trying to prove it to you. He had _no way of knowing_ Delilah would claw her way back!”

“That,” I snarl back over my shoulder, “ _is not the point!_ ”

Meagan – thankfully – acknowledges my mood and says nothing as she directs the skiff towards the docks.

It’s not that I’m angry that he could have stopped Delilah for good fifteen years ago when he had the chance. I mean… yes, it’s a _little_ bit about that. But it’s more about the fact that he could kill a fair and kind Empress for money, only to lose his nerve to the point where he could not neutralise a true threat who _deserved_ death.

I mean. _Really_. Could he _be_ any more of a disaster? Daud was like a poison. Everything he touched turned to fucking _rot_.

But Thomas, much as I loath to admit it, is right. Daud _isn’t_ here. He’s been gone for three years and I can’t keep holding on to anger for a ghost – even if that ghost infects everything in my life from beyond the grave.

Bastard.

“What will you do?” Meagan Foster asks me as she draws the skiff up to a halt.

I step upon the docks on the homeland of my father and Daud, the place where the decay began and where the Duke conspired with Delilah behind my back and plotted to turn my Empire against me, culminating in what happened at the Tower, father frozen in a marble statute. The place where Daud vanished without a trace, three years ago.

What will I do, she asks, the same way the Outsider looked at me with his dark eyes and head tilted to the side and asked _what will you become?_

I cannot read Meagan Foster’s expression as I meet her eyes and pull the scarf around my face, blocking out the thick, disgusting smell of rotting fish and salt and whale blood, the pistol heavy in its holster around my waist. Daud always told me never to make an enemy of a witch, and Delilah is the worst of them all – but I’ve never been very good at following Daud’s suggestions.

I know exactly what I’m going to do. “Whatever it takes,” I reply. “I’m going to take back what’s _mine_.”

* * *

**do as they're told**

“Did you ever play ‘poke the nest’?” my father once asked Daud, an idle query brought on by some-such-comment in the middle of reminiscing about their respective childhoods in Karnaca. It was one of those rare instances where we were eating breakfast together; Corvo’s and Daud’s schedules aligned and they were sharing reports, while I poked at my scrambled eggs and tried to pretend I wasn’t half-asleep and dreading my upcoming meetings.

“A… variation,” Daud had said cautiously, casting a wary glance towards me. “Yes.”

In hindsight, it was foolish of me to ever think I’d kept my night-time trysts and adventures secret from my father and my Spymaster, but to their credit, they allowed me the illusion of freedom. I was in a good mood that morning; Alexi and I had slipped out the palace the night before to the public baths and dived naked before making love under the moonlight. I’d snuck back only hours before and had not slept at all, and most of my energy was being channelled into keeping my eyes open and my head from dropping. Under normal circumstances I’d have told Daud to shut up because I didn’t care about his stories or his childhood, or anything else about him, really. Instead, I stupidly prompted, “Variation?”

He gave me that _look_ – the one that said _you did this to yourself_.

“If by ‘poke the nest’, you mean did the other kids ever dare me to strip naked and walk up to a nest and _kick_ it –” Daud said, meeting Corvo’s wide eyes, “– then yes.”

“Is that how you got _that_ scar?” Corvo asked, smirking, and Daud just raised an eyebrow before I ensured the conversation could go no further.

Unwanted mental images of Daud in the nude aside, both his and my father’s childhoods were lacking in comfort. My father was born into abject poverty here in Karnaca; Daud was born into even less, in that dusty, windswept district that caused them both more pain than anything else. But when they spoke of the streets of their youth, they did so with a peculiar fondness. That harsh, unforgiving land _meant_ something to them – made them smile, share stories about situations that my mother would never have allowed me to get into, like kicking bloodfly nests and stealing crossbows from the City Watch. Though unkind, their childhoods were not sore memories – right up until when their respective mothers died, anyway, at which point in time my father was busy making something of himself while Daud was busy making bad life choices.

The slums of Karnaca that I see would surely never be fond memories to the people here today, no matter how optimistic a personality one might possess.

Though my father never admitted as such, he was never truly comfortable during Dunwall’s cold and steely nights; his time in Coldridge during the bitterest months only served to make that worse, and the layers of clothes he would wear during the Month of Ice weren’t just for the purpose of hiding the trinkets he’d looted. The stories of his that didn’t involve kicking bloodfly nests spoke of his wistfulness for the Jewel of the South he’d left behind as a teenager. The glorious, beautiful Karnaca, where the skies are blue and the waters are clean and gentle, the air smells like faint silver dust and rich street foods and fresh fruit, and the sun shines down to warm the tanned Southerners who live with a dance in their step and fine wine in their veins.

The air here smells diseased. I wouldn’t have noticed it if not for the fact that I’ve just spent two weeks out at sea, where the salt air is crisp and clean, devoid of the taste of smoke and whale oil and steel that lingers in the backs of the throats of all Dunwall residents. The air here still smells like salt but alongside it is a pervasive illness; a rot that reminds me too sharply of the plague that gripped my home during some of the worst years of my life. The heat of the Southern sun cooks the city’s filth and grime and dust and blood and rotting fish together, as though the city is a pot with the lid bolted down and the bloodflies are brewing inside out of control, feeding on the festering muck.

The tension in the air is threatening to make it boil over.

There are guards everywhere, patrolling every avenue and partitioning the streets – their hands on their weapons, their teeth bared, their eyes darting back and forth, either waiting for trouble or looking for trouble.

“So. Empress Delilah,” I hear one say to his friend, passing across a cigarette where they are tucked away in an alleyway corner, sharing a quiet moment together. I slip above their heads, quiet and unnoticed – another shadow in this darkened city. “Another Kaldwin.”

His friend takes a long draw on the cigarette. “Maybe she’ll be better than Empress Emily,” the friend points out, brushing ash off her red uniform jacket.

**_Her brother works in the mines,_** my mother whispers. **_She fears for his life, every single day. Soon she won’t need to fear. She will be grieving instead._**

“Delilah seems to have some influence over the Duke – maybe she’ll convince him to help the city more. Fifteen miners died yesterday in another accident – did you hear?”

The first guard snorts, derisive. “Yeah, I heard,” he drawls, the twang of his accent that reminds me sharply of the subtle undercurrent in both Corvo’s and Daud’s turns of expression, accents that slip out when they’ve had wine or when they’re tired.

**_This one cannot sleep. The sound of the bloodflies at night makes him feel five years old again, stumbling across his father’s corpse._ **

“Like any of them ever care. This one’ll probably be just as bad.”

“Maybe not. The Oracles are saying she’ll be wonderful, and that she’ll fix _everything_. The Blind Sisters are _never_ wrong.”

I melt into the shadows, and leave them to their shared cigarette.

Civil unrest. Discontent. I told Meagan this morning that I knew things were stirring up in the South, but that I didn’t give it much thought. And I didn’t, because I trusted the Duke to handle things instead of being their perpetrator. Because no one told me things were this _bad_. Did Corvo know? Did he receive the reports of unrest, of the protests, of the conditions here – the bloodfly scourge, the deep sickness that is slowly killing his homeland – and keep it from me?

Because I _didn’t care?_

_I know Jessamine would be proud of the woman you are today_ , Corvo had said, and I grimace, my face burning with shame and fury as I stare up at Delilah’s posters, decorating the city – her cold, hard eyes glaring down upon this corroding jewel. My mother would have cared enough in the first place to not let… _this_ happen. The Heart that Daud stilled fifteen years ago beats against my chest, as though in pain for this Empire of hers that has been dying a slow death every single day since the day she left this world.

**_Why do so many have so little? It was never meant to be this way._ **

The Wall of Light – that hideous contraption of Anton’s which haunted Dunwall’s nights for years after the plague was long eradicated – crackles between one partitioned section of the city and the other that I need to get to if I’m to make my way to Addermire. I can go around it, easily, through the bloodfly-infested condemned building on the right. Move slowly, stay low, stay quiet – and if they swarm, use fire. I load the crossbow that Meagan and Thomas provided me with incendiary bolts, ready to make my way across, when a commotion below draws my eye. A rough, burly guard shoves a smaller man to the ground, then as soon as the man stands the guard shoves him again, back towards the Wall.

“I warned you what would happen if you caused trouble,” the guard snarls.

“Please, I’m sorry, I won’t say anything again!” the man cries, cowering – and before I can do anything, say anything, _stop this_ , the guard shoves him again, and the man’s scream cuts out as he disintegrates against the crackling electricity.

I’m no stranger to the way this world works. People die at the hands of others who abuse their power; no matter how hard one rages against the machine, evil and wanton violence will never, ever be truly eradicated from this world. There are things that cannot be avoided, lives that cannot be saved.

Doesn’t mean I can’t try to do something about it.

The guard laughs. “Yeah,” he says to the ash staining the ground. “You won’t.”

When I was twelve my father taught me a trick; he showed me how to use a rewire tool to hack into the electricity modules of Walls of Light and other contraptions, and reverse the polarity – allowing me to pass through harmlessly, while turning it against the very people who thought they were safe. A last resort, my father warned – only to be done if there was no other way.

I don’t need to go through the Wall to get to where I need – I found another way around – but there’s a burning sensation deep in my chest, one that I think has always been there, a constant comfort simmering away unnoticed until the day Delilah froze my father in marble and Ramsey slid a sword through Alexi’s ribs, igniting it, and I don’t really _care_ that I can walk away from this.

I wait until his guard is down. I close my eyes and reach into the Void, allowing it to consume my body and melt me into a walking shadow, to slip through the piping to the other side, pulling out the rewiring tool and rigging the Wall’s polarity. And when the guard’s back is turned, my shadow arm solidifies and wraps around his neck.

“Think pushing people through Walls of Light is fun, do you?” I hiss in his ear. His cry for help is silenced by the pressure of my arm around his throat, constricting his airways – then, with a violent shove, I send him staggering forwards. There’s a blinding flash of light and the smell of cooked flesh stings the air as his body disintegrates into ash, fizzling into nothing against the crackling electricity.

Ah, I think, staring at the ash floating to the dusty ground to join the stain of the man he murdered. So that’s why he did it.

It _was_ fun.

* * *

Originally a solarium, a holiday retreat for wealthy nobles, Addermire was converted into an insane asylum before finally being turned into a research centre, reopening eight years ago as a recuperation hospital and an Institute of Infectious Diseases under the guiding hand of Dr Alexandria Hypatia and funded by then-Duke Theodanis Abele.

Daud shoved a report into my hands shortly after it was reopened.

“Dr Hypatia does good work,” was his gruff assessment of her, eloquent as always. “Takes care of the miners.”

“What do you know of her?”

“Good woman. Decent sort. I met her during the winter I spent at the Academy – she’s brilliant. Between her and Aramis Stilton, conditions have improved a lot in Karnaca since I worked in the mines as a kid.”

“You worked in the mines?” I asked, surprised.

“I worked a lot of places. You should send a thank-you note to both of them. And the Duke. This Institute is going to help a lot of people.”

I should have, but I did not – orders that came from Daud were a sure-fire way to make sure I _didn’t_ do something, so I put it off and put it off again until I eventually forgot, and then when I remembered it was years after the fact and a thank-you note from me would have looked embarrassing at best. And then the Duke died and Luca took his place and Daud didn’t say anything about thanking _him_ for his contributions to Addermire, then Daud disappeared and the reports about Karnaca stopped passing my desk.

But I remember enough about the initial report Daud passed along that Dr Hypatia Alexandria was perhaps the one bright spot in this miserable place. A kind and gentle woman who, unlike Anton, was not an arrogant pariah of the arts and philosophy and medicine, but rather a deeply, passionate woman who devoted her life to the wellbeing of the downtrodden of Karnaca. I collected stories as I slipped through this dying city – a city I neglected and ignored. Stories of the good doctor and her work. Came across her offices around the city, how she would treat patients of their illnesses and silver lungs and bloodfly infections in return for pittance, or trinkets, or food instead of coin, even after Luca Abele ceased funding for Addermire and confined her to the Institute that has fallen into vile disrepair. On the streets the people murmur her name like a heretic would pray to the Outsider, or the way an Overseer would kneel before the Strictures. She _means_ something to the citizens, this one single woman who tried to cure an entire city on her own.

It’s almost impossible to believe that Delilah and her followers somehow perverted this kind, gentle woman into a monster who speaks of ripping limbs and eating flesh and rutting against the corpses.

Grim Alex is the antithesis of everything Dr Alexandria Hypatia is. Was. The creature that desecrates Vasco’s corpse and prowls the room, grunting and snarling – the creature that Delilah let loose upon Dunwall to shred my political critics – was created for one reason: to distract me and my father from what Delilah was truly doing down here.

I know now. Or at least, I _think_ I know.

My mother once taught me that to successfully rule an Empire, four things are vital: happy and healthy people, a good economy, education, and trusted law enforcement. While I was spending nights out on rooftops and getting high with Wyman, letting my paperwork pile up and ignoring my father’s poorly-detailed reports, Delilah somehow… returned from the Void and spent three years destabilising the single most supportive country in the Isles. She captured Luca Abele’s loyalty who took away the miners’ health and safety regulations and then took away their doctor and bankrupted the lower classes, therefore turning the people against me. I don’t know how she blindsided the Overseers – otherwise Jasper Catherick _would_ have known sooner – but the only thing I can think of is that she’s somehow infiltrated the intellectual heart of Serkonos and corrupted the Oracular Order. And then Delilah arranged for Anton to be kidnapped and sent to the mad inventor Kirin Jindosh, and I can only think of one reason: to force him to aid Jindosh in creating an army of Clockwork Soldiers, to replace Abele’s brutal guards, in Delilah’s glory.

She tore down my support structure, and has been building one for herself.

She’s not done, though. Propaganda guided by the Oracular Order is a short-term fix; the people don’t trust her yet and it will take years for the general population to recover from the bloodflies, the scent of death in the air, the despair that seeps into their bones with every passing day, the silver dust that fills their lungs. Perhaps Delilah plans to cure Hypatia herself, and use Hypatia’s gratitude to return her to work in the Empress’s name and regain the love and trust of the people.

I could do the same.

My father, I know, would plead for me to try the cure, but even if Vasco’s cure works, there is no guarantee that it will be permanent, or eradicate the Crown Killer persona from the mind of Dr Alexandria Hypatia. Corvo, who despite everything he had been through, still found alternatives to taking the lives that rightfully belonged to him, either out of belief in the best in humanity or because he derived a sick pleasure from his enemies’ suffering. Perhaps a bit of both. He went through six months of brutal torture and emerged from it vowing to not spill a single drop of blood in his quest to find me and restore me to my throne. He dished out fates worse than death instead, all without dirtying his own hands.

He would show mercy to this creature and attempt to save the doctor, the woman who is much a victim in this as the people her alter-ego has massacred, because that’s just the sort of person he is – a man who showed mercy to those I still don’t think truly deserved it. Despite everything he went through, Corvo tried to see the best in humanity when all humanity had done was hurt him. My father gave monsters second chances, and on one occasion even fell in love with one who only ended up breaking Corvo’s heart as surely as he stilled my mother’s.

Now he’s trapped in marble. Potentially even dead – but I’m not ready to consider this possibility.

My father would want me to give Hypatia a second chance, as he would, but I am not my father. I can’t risk the alternative: that the monster was there all along, and all the serum did was release it. I can’t trust that this monster, this thing calling itself Grim Alex, is only a creation of the flawed serum. That the persona has _not_ come from within the good doctor, but only exists purely in the chemicals that run through her veins and twist her once-brilliant mind. Our scientific advancements these last years have been remarkable, yes – but I do not believe for a moment we have reached an age where sentient and malevolent life can be created in the form of a syringe and injected into a person to consume their brain.

It doesn’t make sense to me that someone could be that kind, that innocent – work that hard to help people unless they were trying to make up for something. Much like how a former assassin who murdered an Empress devoted the rest of his disastrous life to work for the Empress’s daughter.

Delilah stole my Empire from underneath me, and has three years’ worth of a head-start. One almost has to admire her for her craft – and in a way, I do. She was clever. The Outsider said she clawed her way up from the filth, and now she’s an Empress – while I was born with a spoon made from the silver of the Karnacan mines in my mouth and lost the Empire my mother gave me, the Empire my father won back for me.

I allowed this all to happen. But now? Now, I’m going to steal it right back.

_What will you do?_ My fist tightens around the hilt of my father’s blade, and below me, Dr Alexandria Hypatia – Grim Alex – grunts and snarls and paces the ward like a starving hound sniffing out fresh meat. Sniffing out _me_. _What will you become?_

They all wanted a Crown Killer.

I’ll show them what a Crown Killer _really_ looks like.

* * *

**down on their hands and knees**

In his day, Sokolov was Dunwall’s genius. He transformed my city with his inventions – electricity for the factories and carriages racing along above the streets, powered by the oil of the whales that were brought to shore and cruelly slaughtered. As I grew up, his buzzing and glowing devices kept me safe; the Walls of Light that would vaporise ordinary assassins without Daud’s supernatural abilities, mines and arc pylons that could either knock out an enemy or turn their bodies to ash. Though my painting lessons with him didn’t quite pan out, he remained my Royal Physician until Rinaldo took over. His outrageous stories always made me giggle and his grossly inappropriate conversations shocked aristocrats and overseers alike.

He looked in the eyes of the Loyalists who used my father to kidnap him, and laughed in their faces when they threatened him with torture. My father found another way, of course, but the fact remains is that he was always a figure who was larger than life itself – a man of brilliance, who shone as brightly as the stars, completely incomparable.

It breaks my heart to see him this way.

Anton shifts under my shaking touch, his weak, frail body trembling under my hands, and he blinks up at me blearily through swollen eyes. Though it’s only been five years since I last saw him in person, the change is shocking. His skin is wrinkled and he is spotted by age; his hair white and stringy. The clothes he wears are akin to rags, and he can barely form a coherent sentence.

“Emily?” he whispers hoarsely, reaching for my hand. I grasp his grip gently.

“It’s me, Anton,” I say, trying not to cry. “I’m here to save you.”

“Yes… it would be you, wouldn’t it?” He coughs weakly. “If you’re here…”

“There was a coup,” I tell him.

“Jindosh. He –”

“Jindosh will pay for what he’s done,” I say, poison in my voice. “And I’ll make sure Delilah never gets her Clockwork army.”

The prototypes already patrol the streets with their clanking legs of metal and wood, but Delilah wouldn’t have instigated a coup unless she was certain she had the resources ready, or almost ready. This means Jindosh is almost finished.

Much like Rinaldo, Jindosh is a poor substitute for Anton’s brilliance – though perhaps that’s unfair to Rinaldo, who has never been so arrogant about his own abilities that he eschewed Anton’s guidance, and I believe to this day – assuming he survived the coup – keeps a framed certificate with Anton’s signature upon it. Rinaldo reveres Anton; took his word as gospel.

Jindosh is a pig who has tortured an elderly man into forcing him to help perfect his army.

Kirin Jindosh might be Karnaca’s genius – a mad inventor who is building Delilah and the Duke an army of sinister machines – but no amount of brilliance will ever be enough to absolve him of the crimes he has committed.

“The… production line,” Anton croaks. “It’s below the mansion. But it’s not – ready. I wouldn’t give him –”

He breaks off, a hacking cough wracking his slender frame, and I gently tell him to save his breath. “The Clockwork army will never see the light of day. That’s a promise.”

Anton blinks again, frowning deeply – confused and in pain – then finally just sighs. “You were always an interesting little girl, Emily,” he says. “You’re a… terrifying woman.”

Yes. Well.

Anton passes out, and without much difficulty, I manoeuvre him over my shoulder. Jindosh didn’t just torture him with his machines to force him to aid the production of the mechanical army; he starved him as well.

“You’ll be safest in the carriage,” I tell him. He doesn’t reply.

Like a shadow I slip back through the cracks in the walls, and inside the mansion, no one stirs.

“What sort of twisted mind must one have to create such a house?” the nobles, waiting for their appointment with the mad inventor, muse as I return through the hidden rooms behind the walls, Anton safely in the carriage. I almost laugh. Jindosh’s mind isn’t twisted. He’s just a fucking show-off.

Unfortunately for him, so am I.

If Corvo were here instead of me, I know exactly what he’d do. He’d sneak up behind Jindosh, knock him out, and strap to him the very chair that he used to torture Anton. Six months of torture can do odd things to people. It turned Corvo into a kleptomanic who has a curious tendency to dole out thematically appropriate punishments, precisely because, in his mind, the punishments are the opposite of mercy. He doesn’t like spilling blood, but had no problem branding Campbell’s face with the Heretic’s Brand and watching him get eaten alive by the very institution he corrupted. Nothing to do with enjoying causing pain, and everything to do with poetic irony.

I _want_ to hurt Jindosh before I end his life.

“No! No, please – th-think about what you’re doing!” Kirin Jindosh pleads, writhing in the chair he strapped Anton in and tortured him in for months. “An age of enlightenment will be lost –”

I watch on, coolly. His precious age of enlightenment ended the moment Alexandria Hypatia’s mind was destroyed, the moment he began torturing Anton, and the moment he helped Delilah drive Karnaca into the dust.

_“You d-don’t know wh-what you’re d-doing!"_ Jindosh howls. "P-PLEASE, I CAN TELL YOU A-ABOUT D-D-DAUD, _I C-C-C-CAN TELL YOU WHAT H-HAPPENED TO_ –”

I slam the machine off and Jindosh spasms sharply, the electricity vibrating his entire body. He groans, smoking slightly, and I grab him by his shoulders.

“Tell me,” I snap.

Saliva dribbles from the corner of Jindosh’s mouth, his eyes rolling back into his head.

I shake him again. “ _Tell me about Daud!_ ”

He drools some more. “Reverse the… neutron of the… polarity flow,” he mumbles, still twitching on the chair, his clothes singed. He smells of ash and urine; he’s wet himself. “Sodium chlorite is an… element of… I… I… I used to… know…?”

“ _Daud_. Tell me about –”

I break myself off as Jindosh begins to babble, unaware I’m even here at all. His head rolls, his body twitches. When I slide my sword through his ribs to end it, he doesn’t even cry out.

Welcome to the final mystery, Jindosh.

I leave his corpse behind, and on my way out I line up tanks of whale oil through the mansion’s secret corridors and rooms.

I told Anton that the Clockwork abominations would never see the light of day. I wouldn’t be surprised if the destruction wasn’t felt on the other end of Karnaca itself.

I shift Anton’s too-frail body over my shoulders and gently ease him into the carriage while the mansion burns behind us, crumbling to burnt wood and ashes as it crumbles into the waterfall to be swept out to sea, taking with it Jindosh’s clockwork army and his secrets. I arrange Anton as comfortably as possible, and for good measure I loosely wrap a scarf tie around his mouth and nose. It’d be unfortunate if he died of smoke inhalation after everything he’s been through.

* * *

I give Anton several days to recover. Meagan is understandably wary of me interrogating him so soon after his ordeal, but Anton is stronger than she gives him credit for, even if Anton himself disagrees.

“What can you tell me about Delilah?” I ask him, while Meagan sits by his side and holds his hand.

Quite a lot, as it transpires. He tells me about how she drew his attention with her street-side paintings and he offered her an apprenticeship; how her attitude both inspired and repelled all those who worked with her. How she lost his favour and parted ways with him to establish her own career as an up-and-rising painter and sculptor, and how the last noble she scabbed off of was Arnold Timsh, a barrister who capitalised off the plague until the day it all came crumbling down around him – Daud’s work, Thomas tells us, which accounts for the poetic irony my father approved of at the time.

Delilah also told Anton some sob story about the time she and my mother were bosom friends and secret half-sisters, playing together in the palace as children until the day my mother smashed an urn of ashes and pinned the blame on Delilah, causing her and her mother to be cast out onto the streets.

To say this is a shock is an understatement.

“Jessamine would _never_ –” I say, outraged on my mother’s behalf.

“All I am telling you is what Delilah once told me in a bid for sympathy,” Anton says. “And to drive a knife between my friendship with your mother. Now you know why she calls herself a Kaldwin, and why she hates Jessamine so much.”

Why did my father never tell me of this, if it’s true? I don’t see how it’s possible he _didn’t_ know. He was eighteen when he became my mother’s bodyguard; she was twelve. He’d have seen every bit of that bratty child that leaked through in her adolescent journals, which he gifted to me on my sixteenth birthday.

It was both embarrassing and relieving to know that Jessamine wasn’t always the fair and perfect Empress of my memories, or the kind-but-stern mother I miss. The Heart is a shadow of her only, something to remind me of everything that I’ve lost, and it speaks with her voice and sometimes – just sometimes – I can hear the disdain in her tone, like the days when she made a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it savage quip about Hiram Burrows’ personal hygiene. But the journals reveal her as a pampered child, and frankly, a little bit of a shit.

She had the most _dreadful_ crush on my father for a couple of years there. There are pages upon pages in the middle years of passages like “He’s so dreamy” and “Corvo is so mysterious and handsome, every time I meet his gaze my heart flutters. Does he feel the same way?” and at least one heart sketched around my father’s name. Then the tone changed and she decided that he was aloof and arrogant and too devoted to his service, and then it shifted again when she was eighteen and maturity finally wove through her words.

It was cringe-worthy for her daughter at the age of sixteen to read, and thankfully the entries ended before any intimacy started happening between Jessamine and Corvo, though that wouldn’t be half as traumatising as the one and only time I happened across Corvo and Daud committing public indecency in a corridor. Jessamine could be arrogant, and wrote passages eviscerating members of her parliament for being sods, but those were the rantings of a young Empress-to-be who could rarely express herself in public. There were equal amounts of passages wondering about how to solve the socio-economic imbalances in Dunwall, and the concerns about the rising sea levels after storms affecting the commerce districts. She was pampered, yes, but she was never _cruel._

She wasn’t like _me_.

And there wasn’t a single passage that mentioned the name ‘Delilah’, which is why I have trouble believing anything about what Anton says my mother allegedly did to her.

“Is she, though?” I demand. “Is Delilah really – my aunt?”

“I cannot say for sure. Paternity is always harder to prove. Joplin and I were working on a way to test the cells of a person, before we parted ways.”

“You should apologise to Piero. I know you two miss each other.”

“Me – apologise to _him?_ ” Anton scoffs. “I’ll apologise the moment he crawls back and begs for forgiveness and not a moment sooner.”

I sigh.

“As I was saying,” Anton continues hotly. “A paternity test. The method is imprecise and incomplete, however. Even if I had the resources, I cannot guarantee the results would be reliable.”

I grimace and begin to turn away, but Anton’s next words stop me.

“Though…” he says, “Delilah’s eyes. They are a spitting reflection of Euhorn’s.”

So she really could be my aunt.

“I’ll take care of _that_ problem later,” I mutter. “For now, Jindosh has been removed from play, along with the production factory. Delilah won’t have her glorious Clockwork Army. What’s my next move?”

“Ah, Kirin,” Anton mutters, shaking his head. “A despicable waste. He and Delilah were fond of each other during their apprenticeships. Often encouraged each other’s mad inventions and artworks, spoke about me behind my back and thought they were being subtle with their complaints. Bah! Such is the arrogance of youth. I fell out with both of them, and then Delilah vanished without a trace fifteen years ago.”

Courtesy of Daud.

“Only last year did I begin to hear whispers of her name where I was working at the Royal Conservatory,” Anton continues. “The Curator, Breanna Ashworth, recently became the Vice Oracle.”

Meagan shifts uncomfortably where she sits, an almost imperceptible movement.

“She was one of Delilah’s sycophants back in the day,” Anton continues. “That ought to have tipped me off far sooner that something was wrong.” He sneers, but this turns into a foul, hacking cough. Meagan grabs a coarse blanket and wraps it around his shoulders, holding him steady until his coughing subsides. “That woman is no Oracle.”

“Breanna Ashworth,” I murmur, watching Anton shuffle back to his quarters, exhausted.

“Delilah’s confidante, you might call her,” Meagan says.

“You know of her?”

“Knew her,” Meagan corrects. “Yes.” There’s a pause. “Emily… back when I lived in Dunwall, I did some things that I’m not proud of.”

“Isn’t that a requirement for citizenship?” I ask wryly.

Meagan doesn’t laugh. “What I’ve got to say is not a joke,” she says. “I knew Delilah and Ashworth. Bought into their bullshit, which led me down a bad road. I don’t want to get into it right now, but I felt like you deserved to know. There are – things I regret.”

“Someday I’d like to know more about how you know Ashworth,” I say, my tone indicating that someday, this question will not be a request.

“I know you would,” Meagan replies.

Meagan has done nothing but aid me so far. If there was a more pressing secret that could aid me that she is hiding, I have a right to know it. The best I can guess is that she was part of the coven that Daud took down fifteen years ago. But then, if it was that important, or that horrific, I’m sure Anton or Thomas would have urged her to reveal it by now.

I’ll let it slide.

For the moment.

“There’ll be a Grand Guard outside the Conservatory. Inside, be prepared for anything. Ashworth runs with an… eclectic crowd.” Meagan narrows her unmarred eye. “They’ll be the real danger.”

I nod. “Ashworth is currently leading the Order, then,” I say, returning my focus to my next step. “I can’t let that continue.”

_Those who control the past, write the future_ , my mother once told me, impressing upon me the importance of the Order. Often she praised the work of the Blind Sisters, whose Blindness is greatly exaggerated. She spoke of their work – their cleverly cultivated reputation of receiving divine prophecies when in fact they were simply learned women who studied the past and patterns of history to guide and advise the present and future, back in the days when the voice of a woman was worth barely half that of a man’s.

The Oracular Order was and always will be the intellectual heart and soul of my Empire; the Overseers, the enforcers of their prophecies. While the Oracular Order remains under Delilah’s control, she controls the narrative.

So. I’m going to change the narrative.

“Ashworth is Delilah’s confidante, you say?” I repeat, gathering my equipment.

“Among other things,” Meagan says, with a tone of voice that makes it easy enough to imagine just what ‘other things’ she is to Delilah. I nod my head, and tell Meagan I’ll meet her at the skiff.

“Empress,” Thomas asks, wheeling closer to me while I gather my crossbow bolts and telescope as Meagan heads up the stairs to the main deck. “Why are you doing this?”

I frown, facing him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he says coolly, “that when you were still on your throne, you spent every waking moment _not_ wanting to rule the Empire. I think I spent more of my nights following you out on rooftops than anything else. You didn’t care then – and now suddenly you’re willing to do anything and everything to get it back?”

I don’t care much for his tone. “I’d think anyone in my position would.”

“You know what you remind me of?” Thomas says, voice tight. “A child who doesn’t want to play with a toy, until another kid picks it up and starts playing with it, and now you’re throwing a tantrum.”

I don’t have to justify myself to Thomas, of all people. But my mother’s Heart beats in my inside jacket pocket, against my own pounding heart, and I clench my jaw. _Jessamine would be proud of the woman you are today_ , Corvo said, but nothing could be further from the truth. I chew the inside of my lip.

Thomas’s words are harsh, but the truth is, I was arrogant. Worse than that, I was _apathetic_. So assured of my own status as Empress that I assumed my throne was safe while I wasted my hours doing everything except the role I was born into. All those nights out on the rooftops, imagining pirate battles and chasing grave-robbers across the city instead of reading the reports Daud carefully crafted for me. Practicing melee and shooting with my father instead of attending meetings. Ditching my sessions in parliament in favour of getting high with Wyman, and expecting Corvo to attend on my behalf instead.

I didn’t want to be Empress, least of all because it fell to me after my mother’s death when I was only ten years old. I was Empress before I went through puberty; Empress before I had my first kiss. Father tried to maintain my childhood as best he could, but as I grew, the throne became a burden, an unwanted task that only served to remind me of my mother’s death.

I’ll do anything to get it back.

“This Empire was the last thing my mother gave to me,” I say. “It was hers, and she was murdered by people who sought to take it for themselves. My father won it back for me, and I – treated it poorly. But Delilah will damage it more. I will not let her tarnish my mother’s name.”

Thomas remains silent while I speak.

_I’m going to be Empress_ , I said to Daud, the day he saved me from falling to my death. Somewhere between then and now, that ten year old girl who looked her mother’s murderer in the eye and told him that the Empire was hers, the girl who drained the Flooded District and eradicated the Plague, became a… a joke. A parody of herself.

I can’t even remember what my last significant accomplishment _was_. The last act I made as Empress was to launch a ship bearing my mother’s name. As though the people care about _that_ waste of their taxpayer money.

Another apathetic noble, undeserving of her status. Funny how we don’t realise how much someone or something means to us until it’s gone.

“The throne is mine,” I tell Thomas, sheathing the folding sword at my waist, beside Daud’s pistol. “And I _will_ prove myself worthy of my mother’s legacy.”

* * *

**come home broken**

When I was sixteen years old, I held a knife to Daud’s throat.

“Tell your men,” I’d snarled, “to stop following me. I don’t want them spying on me.”

“They’ve been following you for years,” Daud said, vastly unconcerned by the knife digging into his trachea. There was a small, barely imperceptible scar there, no bigger than a papercut – the place where my father held his own sword to Daud’s throat, while Daud begged for his worthless life. “Have you only just noticed now?”

“The point is that I _have_ noticed, and you _will_ tell them to stand down,” I snapped. “Or else –”

“Or else what?” Daud said, raising an eyebrow. “You’ll slit my throat?”

“You think I won’t?” I demanded.

“Not with that grip,” Daud said. “And besides, your knife is blunt.”

There was also the matter of Corvo, I suppose, who probably wouldn't be impressed if I'd killed his lover. I wouldn’t have pulled that knife across Daud’s throat meaningfully; I don’t think I had that in me, not then. Still, I had my pride to consider, and I didn’t pull away. I bared my teeth and steeled myself as though as I was one heartbeat away from using my blunt knife to open his neck, and _still_ he didn’t flinch.

“You can try, if you’d like,” Daud said.

So I tried, sort of. And before I knew it, I was on my back, winded, my arm twisted and my blade flung to the far corner of the room.

He didn’t even have to tap into the Void.

Times like that I remembered he wasn’t just my mother’s killer, or my Spymaster, or my father’s lover. He was the Knife of Dunwall. He was called that for a reason, with or without his powers.

I’d coughed and wheezed, pulling myself to my feet, and Daud knelt beside me. “It’s easy to cut a throat, but there are better ways than to just hold your knife to one and drag it across.”

“Corvo was going to kill you like that,” I’d snapped, still wheezing. He did not offer me his hand to help me stand, not that I would have taken it anyway. I finally stood, unsteady on my feet, and he crossed his arms.

“Corvo had me at his mercy and I would have let him,” Daud said bluntly. “But if you’re approaching an enemy from the front, they can still scream or even disarm you, which you don’t want if you’re trying to kill someone silently. Approach quietly from behind – Corvo’s giving you stealth lessons, isn’t he? Approach from behind and drive your blade through the carotid arteries from the side.” He pressed his fingers to the sides of his neck, as though taking his pulse. “Here. Make sure the knife punctures both arteries. Then grip the handle firmly and punch forward and down, cutting the vocal cords. Major blood loss, in complete silence.”

"Are you _encouraging_ me to kill?"

"I'm not encouraging anything," he said, coolly. "But if you end up in a situation where it's necessary, you might as well know how to do it properly."

“You’re an Empress,” Alexi pointed out after I'd given her the rundown of the situation, because she'd noticing the bruising on my backside. She'd reached for my face to tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear. I’d sighed softly and leaned into her touch. “Empresses don’t slit throats.”

“ _This_ one might have to.”

Daud always did have a soft spot for Alexi. He didn’t talk to me for two weeks after she and I agreed to only maintain a professional relationship.

Few people in this world will ever compare to Alexi Mayhew or mean as much to me as she does. As she _did_. Our friendship was initially one of circumstance; she was a young cadet training with the City Watch who happened to be part of my armed guard during my early, tenuous years as Empress. Being two girls of the same age in a world and employ that does not lend itself well to gender equality, we were naturally drawn to each other; she would laugh at my disparaging remarks, and I loved to listen to her stories about the ridiculous things the Watch officers would get up to, usually during long carriage rides all across the city where I was carted about for official appearances.

On one such carriage ride, when we were both fourteen, my father was too far away to protect me when the Regenters attacked. I’d been in life-threatening situations before and thanks to the training my father and Daud were giving me, I knew how to defend myself, though we hadn’t quite reached the ‘how to survive a grenade blast’ section yet. I remember it so clearly; Alexi, leaning out through the window and firing her pistol with her red hair fiercely whipping around her face in the wind, me, kicking the boot of my heel into the face of a Regenter trying to drive a dagger into my chest, and the clattering and sparking of a live grenade being tossed into the carriage, rolling about on the floor.

I froze. Alexi did not. She took one look at the grenade, dived down, scooped it up in her bare hands, and lobbed it straight back out the window of the carriage.

I think I fell a little bit in love with her then. Afterwards, when the City Watch finally deigned to arrive to arrest what remained of our assailants, I gripped her hands and gasped that she was amazing, and Alexi blushed a little and shook her head but was unable to stop a grin. I knew there and then that I wanted her to be my Lady Protector one day, and I knew she wanted that as well.

When I think of Alexi, I think of her fierceness, her bravery; I think about her earnestness and how utterly genuine she is – was – in everything she did. Too often I was approached by social-climbers like Wyman, who sought only to use me because I am – _was_ – a ticket to the most prestigious rank in all the Isles, but Alexi wasn’t like that. All she ever wanted to do was join the City Watch and prove herself as one of the finest soldiers Dunwall had ever seen. Not that she _ever_ needed to prove that to anyone – I already knew she was. When I think of her, I think of her hair, whipping around her freckled face in the wind, her expression firm and determined as she lobbed a live grenade back at people who wanted my head. I think of her cheeky grin as she teased me for various verbal slips about Daud, I think of the way we would drift together, our hands finding each other’s, the way she would reach for my face and tuck a strand of loose hair behind my ear. The way I would lean into her touch and not even know why it felt so good, so natural.

I think about us both at the age of seventeen, tentatively kissing for the first time, finally acting on the slow, burning feelings that had been simmering between us since the age of fourteen; the softness of her lips and the firmness of her hands upon my waist, my own heart fluttering and my hands shaking as I kissed her back and explored her body, all my confidence and abrasiveness melting away under her touch. I think of her at the age of eighteen, immediately being appointed to the Watch, the sheer pride I felt reflected in her expression as she met my eyes and winked. I think of us making love that very night, celebrating her appointment, our bodies shaking and damp with sweat as I held her in my arms in the aftermath.

I remember the day after another attempt on my life that Alexi and my father halted together upon receiving information from my then-Spymaster, and feeling my heart break as I saw the same expression on her face that I saw on my father’s the day Jessamine died. We were both twenty years old and she was a newly-promoted Lieutenant, one of the youngest women in the City Watch to have ever achieved that rank. I remember her tears – _my_ tears – as I sat down with her and held her hands and told her we couldn’t be together anymore, not like that, not if she wanted to be my Royal Protector because I knew how that story ended and I couldn’t bear the thought of her going through what Corvo did if something were to befall me. I remember us promising together that we would never again mix duty and pleasure and we would remain the dearest of friends and maintain a professional relationship, but nothing more.

And then breaking that promise, just once.

I could never call that a mistake. The only mistake I made was taking her for granted. For being so fucking _selfish_.

Delilah desecrated the anniversary of my mother’s death. She is the reason Daud is missing, of that I have no doubt – and therefore responsible for the grief my father carried with him for three years. She is responsible for uprooting my entire life – for casting my father in cold marble and taking away everyone I ever loved in this Voidforsaken world. Alexi, Anton, Corvo – and yes, even _Daud_.

I don’t care what she’s been through or how much Delilah has suffered. Everyone in this world has suffered in some way or another – what makes Delilah’s pain more important than mine? And more importantly: why does she think it gives her the right to claim a throne? Blood isn’t what makes a ruler; it’s how you lead. My mother taught me that. I wasn’t very good at it and I paved the way for her, but if Delilah has to fuck up a country specifically to make a play for power, I’d say she’s even worse than I was.

Breanna Ashworth is to Delilah was Alexi was to me. I want her to know what it’s like to watch someone _she_ loves die right before her eyes.

Delilah’s statute screams mid-sentence as I slide my sword through the side of Breanna Ashworth’s neck like a hot knife through butter, severing her carotid arteries. She chokes and I grip the handle, punching forward and down with the blade, slicing her throat open. The blood sprays across Delilah’s statue, staining it with the witch’s blood, and Ashworth falls to the floor in a fit of violent spasms, then stills.

“You _wretched child!_ ” Delilah’s statue howls as I step over Ashworth’s body. “You have _no idea_ what she meant to me –”

“Alexi Mayhew,” I hiss. “Remember that name. _Alexi Mayhew_. She meant the world to me and your dog Ramsey murdered her before my eyes. You took her from me because of a grudge you hold against a woman who has been dead for fifteen years!”

“My mother died because of Jessamine, I took what was mine by _right_ –”

“You think you are the only one in this world to lose your mother?” I snarl. “Get over yourself. We’re even now for mothers, assassins, inventors, and beloved friends. You have no army and the Oracular Order is now free from your poisonous influence. So sleep with one eye open, Delilah Copperspoon – because I’ve almost finished settling the score. Give me back my throne, and my father, and maybe I’ll let you and your spawn walk away from this.”

That’s a lie. But I thought I’d offer it anyway.

“Maybe _I_ will take a hammer to your father tonight and toss the pieces over the side of a ship.”

“Don’t you _dare_ –”

“Little sparrow, so far away from home,” Delilah coos, though there is agony in her voice. “As foolish as your mother, as pathetic as Daud.”

“What happened to Daud?” I demand. "Where is he?"

“Concern, little girl, for your surrogate father figure?” She tilts her head, the stone crumbling softly about her shoulders. “Or perhaps something more _intimate?_ ”

“You disgust me,” I spit. “You have no idea how far I will go to take back what you stole. I will destroy _everything you love_.”

Delilah laughs. “There is nothing you’ve done that I cannot fix.”

“I’m going to end your reign, Delilah.”

“Neither Corvo nor Daud could still my heart; your weapons will not either. But I welcome you to try.”

Oh, I’m not going to try. Delilah _will_ die by my hand.

* * *

**ain't no one happy**

Years of putting up with my father’s kleptomania has instilled in me a deep anti-hoarding mentality. I do not pick up coins from gutters or off peoples’ belts, I do not collect keepsakes beyond the few prized possessions my mother owned, the blade I now wield, and the thus-far unfired pistol Daud handed to me fifteen years ago on Kingsparrow Island.

But I can’t bear to leave the Blade Verbena trophy my father won so long ago behind.

It was an accident, finding his childhood home – or perhaps, like many things in this world, the black-eyed bastard had a hand in pushing me towards it. I was spying on the Overseer outpost, crouched in a narrow alleyway to the left of the outpost, when a dust storm, worse than the others I’d encountered so far, swept up, almost blinding me and suffocating me through the cloth that covers my nose and mouth. There was a creaking from up above – a boarded window that I shot out quickly with my crossbow – and using the Void, I Reached up to the sill and took shelter inside the dilapidated abandoned apartment.

When I think of my father’s childhood, I imagine him on the streets, or spying on the guards training and learning their movements until he was good enough to enter the Blade Verbena. Like Daud, he rarely spoke of his home like – of his mother, who died shortly after he left for Dunwall, or his sister Beatrici, who vanished at sea. Was it him, I wonder, or his mother who holed up the hard-won trophy that changed the direction of his life and set him on a better path, too broken-hearted at losing her son to bear to look at the catalyst? I suppose I’ll ask him when I get back to –

_Oh._

I breathe hard and slip the trophy into my bag, closing my eyes tightly, feeling the burn of tears at the back of my eyelids.

Father. _Corvo_. I don’t even know if there’s a way to free him from his marble prison – whether he even still lives, or if Delilah has stilled his heart forever and the statue of him, face in agony and his hands outstretched in desperation, will be the last memory I ever have of him, provided my mind doesn’t snap between now and the time I return to Dunwall and I decide I’d rather keep him as decoration for my throne room. But if there is a way, I will rescue him.

And I’ll save this disgusting city, too. Somehow.

The Dust District was once known as Batista – the streets where my father and Daud both grew up together in abject poverty. If I thought Karnaca was bad upon arrival, I realise now that was only the tip of the proverbial Pandyssian iceberg. Batista is a rotting skeleton; a carcass sucked dry by the Duke like a crumbling nest left behind by a swarm of bloodflies. Emaciated corpses litter the streets, the dust storms sweep through every five minutes, suffocating the citizens and choking the air. Weeds can’t even grow between the cracks in the cobbled streets because of how much silver dust layers the district. There is no money, no food, and the people here limp through their existences as though merely putting one foot in front of the other, shuffling towards the executioner’s axe as they follow the path down to Stilton’s old mine. And if the bloodflies and the dust storms and the foremen don’t kill enough people, between Liam Byrne, the Vice Overseer, and Paolo, leader of the Howlers, it’s a wonder there are even people left in this district.

My instinct, of course, is to go to the Overseers for aid. But this is not Jasper Catherick’s territory. My High Overseer’s grip on Dunwall’s religious order is fierce, but the brother Abbeys around my Empire are too far-flung and region-specific for Jasper to establish a foothold. He has _friends_ , certainly – but none that I know by name, and none I can seek out in fear of exposing myself.

Jasper. I wonder how he’s doing – if his note was true and he is working to resist Delilah’s regime, or if he has calculated the merits and pitfalls and has forgone his promise, given that witchcraft doesn’t bother him half as much as the intent behind it. His loyalty to me stretches as far as my worth, and I was good for his position. Now I’m as good as nothing, and if Delilah has offered him the same, or more, he will cut his losses. He’s strategic like that.

Corvo always did warn me not to trust Jasper Catherick.

But I can’t quite believe it. Despite Jasper’s tendency towards self-service and strict neutrality except when there is a clear benefit to himself, I truly believe him to be a decent man at heart. Daud would not have trusted him so much otherwise. The last thing Meagan Foster heard from her contacts in Dunwall is that there’s a resistance movement against Delilah being formed. Perhaps Jasper is going to try and move against Delilah sooner or later. He doesn’t know that she cannot be killed.

Liam Byrne is nothing like Jasper. Where Jasper believes in – himself, I suppose? Certainly not the Strictures – Byrne believes in every single righteous writ of the Abbey’s holier-than-thou lectures. He’s a fanatic, and I’m a heretic now. The music boxes will paralyse me.

_Vice Overseer Byrne is an ambitious man, but he believes in the Abbey's mission,_ the Outsider told me at the shrine, _protecting the good people of the empire against the likes of us. You know he'd be happier deep down if this ended with Breanna Ashworth's head on a spike. Maybe yours as well._

Especially mine.

I suppose I could go to Paolo, who almost reminds me of Slackjaw taken to the logical extreme if my mother had been a tyrant, but that would also be foolish of me. He’s not one of those unhinged cultists who believes the Outsider will grant him favours if he makes the right sacrifices. By all accounts, he doesn’t care at all for the Outsider – he just cares about getting ahead, and he’ll do whatever it takes. He and Byrne are both fanatics of their own causes; one would arrest and execute me for heresy, and the other would string me up and make an example of me to the common folk. If I side with the Overseers and dismantle the Howlers, Karnaca will be caught under the thumb of a religious fanatic. If I side with the Howlers, Karnaca will be run by a group so fiercely independent that it will be impossible to install an effective Duke to keep the country running on my behalf.

The third option is to not interfere with either of them.

The Dust District hangs in a delicate balance; Paolo and Byrne are keeping each other in check. Once I take out Luca Abele, there will be a power vacuum – but with the Overseers and the Howlers at each other’s necks, neither illustrious leader will be able to take advantage while I get my act together, take down Delilah, and find a new Duke.

The answer, then, is simple. I’ll rob the Overseers for what I need, then I’ll rob the Howlers, and I’ll find my own damn way into Stilton’s mansion – and figure out how Delilah came back, and why she can’t be killed.

_The Duke inherited a vibrant city and wasted no time stripping it to the bone_ , the Outsider had said. _What will he leave behind? And what about you? Who will you leave to pick up the pieces here in the Jewel of the South?_

I don’t know yet. And I’m running out of time to figure it out.

* * *

“Three years ago, something inside Aramis Stilton snapped like a cheap lock. A part of him – and a part of this house – never left that evening. You can feel it, can’t you?”

That’s an understatement. I more than feel it – I can taste it, as though cold metal coats the inside of my mouth and lead has flooded my bloodstream, settling in my extremities and weighing me down. I feel decrepit, trapped – like the rundown mansion, with its rotten fruit and bloodfly nests and layers of thick dust and crumbling walls, has chained me to its fate. Every step is an effort, every breath is like I am underwater and slowly drowning on dry land.

“The magic is perverted here,” I say, flexing my Marked hand. There is no familiar cold burn. It’s like the Void itself has been amputated from me. “Things aren’t working like they should.”

The Outsider inclines his head, sliding off the piano like smoke, a swift, elegant movement. “The Duke’s inner circle are still gathered here, setting their grand plan into motion,” he says, and begins to prowl, pacing around me like I’m his prey. I shiver. “Delilah’s plan. And a part of Aramis Stilton is always here, still breaking.”

“You mean it’s – still happening?” I ask. “How?”

He smirks. “Time doesn’t flow the way most people think it does. You divide your reality into centuries, into decades, into years, into months, confining all of existence into markings on a clock so you can watch the seconds and hours tick away as though time itself is running out. Time is infinite, Emily Kaldwin. And the Void is much older and stranger than you could ever know. It watches you from within, and affects everything in this world. At the heart of Stilton’s house, the Void is leaking through a pinprick left by Delilah’s little trick.”

I’m still not sure I understand. “What did she do?”

He doesn’t reply, exactly. He conjures something from the frozen air – a device, larger than the Heart that beats quietly against my own, an elegant mirror built upon a delicate clockwork base. It’s beautiful.

“Take this,” he says, and I reach for the device, peering through the mirror. The room I see through it is vibrant and clean, a room worthy of royalty – and then I realise after a moment that it’s _this_ room. A different version of this room. Three years ago – I’m staring into the past itself. I look around the room through the device, watching Aramis Stilton – whole, healthy and sane – depart the room three years ago, while the current Stilton sits on the chair of the piano, frozen halfway between an addled mumbling, his expression wretched and confused.

“Imagine it’s a kind of time piece,” the Outsider says. “Go and watch Delilah. See for yourself what she did.”

“Why can’t you just tell me?” I ask.

“Time doesn’t flow the way you think it does, Emily,” he repeats. “What she did has always happened, is happening, will happen forever –”

“You don’t know,” I realise. “You can’t see what she did. She’s – hidden it from you, somehow.”

“Be careful, Empress,” the Outsider warns, leaning close. “You might find more than you expect.”

“Find what?” I ask, but he has already vanished and time resumes, Stilton plodding away on his out-of-tune piano, muttering to himself.

I grimace and hold up the time piece, and will it to pull me through to the beautiful room I see three years in the past. It tugs me hard behind my navel and I feel the world narrow and tighten, as through I’m being squeezed through that pinprick in the Void – and then I’m out, breathing hard, standing in Aramis Stilton’s manor, three years ago.

Sokolov dabbled once in the theory of time travel. Admittedly, I didn’t pay much attention during these lessons, my eight-year-old self thinking time travel fanciful and impossible and much preferring to imagine pirate battles and daring sword fights. But I do recall something he said about the two main schools of thought – paradoxical time travel, and circular time travel, the debate about whether altering the past would affect the present or future, or if in fact any alterations made in the past simply _created_ the present and future. The whole, step on a rat a few hundred years ago deal, and when you return to the present Pandyssia has conquered the world and the Empire of the Isles collapsed decades prior.

It could be completely bogus, but it’s still not a risk I’m willing to take. I’m here only to observe – to make my way through this mansion, to make no alterations, and then return to the present when I find out how Delilah managed to return to this world from the Void.

But surely a single piece of fruit won’t hurt. I pass a desk as I head towards the door; on it is a platter of fresh fruit and my mouth waters for the taste of peach. I pick it up and begin to eat, my eyes flicking to the calendar that sits on the table as well, the days marked off.

I almost choke on my mouthful.

16th Day of the Month of Rain, 1849, I read, and my blood runs as cold as ice.

* * *

At the age of forty-two, the age he was when our paths crossed for the first time, Daud looked older than he actually was. Aged far too young by a metric ton of cigarettes and bad life choices, the Knife of Dunwall had little reason to care for his appearance prior to becoming my Spymaster when the role required him to look marginally presentable and wear a uniform instead of that fraying red rag he had the audacity to call a jacket. His brown hair was already peppered with grey, and the grotesque scar that ran from his temple to the corner of his mouth down the right side of his hard, weathered face destroyed any chance of symmetry, though to my horror Corvo once described the scar as “distinguished”.

To me his face was always the face of a monster. The face of the man who killed my mother.

“Your scar,” I said once when I was thirteen, curiosity winning out over seething hatred for a brief moment. “How did you get it?”

“I slipped in the bathtub,” Daud grunted in return.

I’m not sure I believe that. The point is, I have never considered him handsome and despite his claim to having a “great personality” (which I fundamentally disagreed with), I could not understand what drew my father to him.

Seeing his face again, three years in the past, three years since the last time I ever saw it, through the Outsider’s Timepiece, I loathe that I am forced to reconsider my opinion.

At the age of fifty-four – _Corvo’s_ age – he isn’t quite as old as I remember him being. His hard, weathered face is just that of a middle-aged man, not especially old, just more damaged and worn. And the scar which I always thought more of a blemish to add insult to injury isn’t the hideous deformation of my exaggerated memories. It’s just a fucking scar, on the slightly less-than-average face of the man who saved me from falling to death.

A man who made my father smile. A man who made my father _happy_.

A man who protected me for twelve years, and I can’t remember a single time I thanked him.

Three years ago, on this very night, my Spymaster vanished without a trace. His Whalers-turned-public-servants lost their powers, and my father’s heart broke. At first I thought he had cut and run, finally leaving us all behind and starting a life with the freedom I issued him when I was twelve years old and told him he could do with his life as he pleased. But if nothing else, I thought we’d receive a letter, an explanation, _something_ – so I decided he must have died, because I’d rather he’d be dead than accept the fact that he broke Corvo’s heart of his own free will and abandoned me.

He’s _not_ dead. Not yet, anyway. Something must happen on this night for him to have vanished the way he did because he’s _here_ , kneeling in the rafters out in the gardens of Stilton’s mansion, three years in the past – squinting at Aramis who is pacing agitatedly in his pavilion, that dour expression on his face he always got when he was in deep concentration, scowling at his paperwork.

Daud didn’t abandon me. He was trying to _protect_ me and Corvo, from Delilah.

_Again_.

Even though it was his fault she wasn’t taken care of properly in the first damn place.

I could play this several ways. I could just keep watching him. Follow him in relative safety of the present, just watching his every move, and not interfere. I’d get to see why and how he vanished, or died, and be able to tell Corvo – if Corvo is still alive – what happened and finally give us both closure.

In the present, the air is thick with the smell of dust and rotten fruit and blood from the bloodfly nests that buzz and swarm when I edge too near. Daud, three years ago, kneeling in the rafters when the garden was alive and beautiful and probably smelled like flowers instead of death, has no idea I’m here beside him, staring at him through the time piece.

I don’t intend to allow the time piece to pull me through the pinprick in the Void, but it does anyway, and I feel the world around me narrow and tighten – and then I’m standing the past, next to Daud, on the night of the 16th Day of the Month of Rain in 1849.

The night he vanished. The night Delilah returned.

“D—” I start to say, breathless and shaken, and Daud’s blade slides under my throat.

* * *

**a limp in your walk**

If not for the fact that the 16th Day of the Month of Rain in the year 1849 was the same day that Daud vanished from the face of this world, the date itself would have been entirely inconsequential. As it is, I’m unable to forget it, mostly thanks to Corvo who mopes like clockwork every time it rolls around – and therefore I remember in precise detail what I was doing that night in Dunwall.

I was out of the Tower that night, exploring the rooftops – not straying as far as usual, because Alexi tagged along with me, and we’d decided to break into Dr Galvani’s home to move his things around. Well, _I_ decided to do that – Alexi was there to make sure I didn’t get into too much trouble. It was well after midnight by the time we returned. I’d left after dinner to relative peace and quiet; I came back to a palace in a state of panic. Thomas was dying in the medical wing, being kept alive by tubes running through his entire body. The guards were bringing us reports of some of Daud’s men being trapped on the rooftops.

My father was pitched against a wall, deathly pale and barely breathing.

The time in the past at the moment is still before midnight, but only just. Dunwall and Karnaca share the clocks. Around about now, my younger self is rifling through Dr Galvani’s workshop and moving his rat viscera display around, not giving a single thought to whatever it was that my Spymaster, who’d been gone for almost six weeks at that stage, was up to.

I didn’t really imagine _this_.

It's like I'm sixteen years old again, forgetting who and what Daud is. Daud was – _is_ – a man I associate with death; my mother’s life is on his hands and nothing will ever change that. I still dream about my mother’s broken cry as he struck her across the face and drove his blade through her chest. His reflexes are as fast and swift as they were fifteen years ago – _twelve_ years ago for him.

This isn’t just the man who made a home in the attic and scowled over paperwork and put up with Corvo’s kleptomania. With or without his powers, blunted and retired, this man is still a ruthless murderer. The Knife of Dunwall.

And I just snuck up on him.

Neither of us move. I _can’t_ move. If I move, if I so much as breathe, I’ll slice my own throat open on the blade that killed my mother. And Daud just waits, his expression cold and deadly, as he holds my life on the edge of his sword.

He's going to kill me.

"Daud," I whisper, my throat moving against the cold sword digging into my voicebox. "Please –"

The blade presses harder against my throat and I feel the skin there sting and split, just a little. Oh, Void. He's really going to kill me. I'm going to die on the end of his blade like Jessamine did, terrified and pleading; die the way Daud should have died, begging for his life, when my father held his sword to his throat.

"Who are you."

I squeeze my eyes burning eyes shut, tears spilling down my cheeks before I can stop them. "Daud, it's me –"

"Emily Kaldwin is in Dunwall,” he growls, and the blade digs harder. “ _Who. Are. You_."

There are a million things I can say to convince him – like how he told me about the day his mother died, or the words he spoke to me up on the lighthouse when he saved my life for the second time, or the time when I was seventeen and I threw a gin glass at him and split his head because he implied he was disappointed in my disinterest in an internship with the Academy.

But the words jam in my mind and my tongue is frozen, and all I can do is fumble for the loaded pistol at my waist, knowing that if he'd wanted it, his blade would be through my carotid arteries and I'd be dead already. It's as though the air itself draws in a breath; an anticipation for Daud to end this now, but I hold out the gun in my hand, handle-first, just the way he held it out to me fifteen long years ago.

Twelve years ago for him.

One heartbeat.

Two heartbeats.

Three heartbeats.

The blade falls away and I slump forwards, coughing hard, clutching my throat and expecting to find a gaping wound and a rush of blood – expecting to gurgle and die, an undignified ending to a deposed Empress.

But instead I only feel a small cut, barely splitting the skin, and a light trickle of blood drips across my fingers. Daud swears, and I feel his hand on my shoulder, though whether it's me or him trembling, I cannot tell. He hauls me up to meet his eyes.

" _Emily_?" he hisses.

"You – _fucking asshole_ ," I choke, and he drops his sword as though it's poison.

* * *

I often thought about what happened to Daud. How the great Knife of Dunwall may have finally met his end. Was it as pithy as getting caught in the middle of a gang war between the Howlers and the Overseers, dying anonymously without dignity between a shoot-out? Had he stumbled over the wrong abandoned house and got stung to death by bloodflies, his corpse now the base for a nest? Or, hell, maybe something happened to his hand – maybe it was cut off or injured and he was sent to the silver mines with his tongue sliced out and his body in chains like so many others, starved or beaten half to death and powerless to escape. Death, in that case, would be preferable.

Suffice to say, now I’m wondering if the reason he vanished three years ago is because I fucking killed him _myself_.

“How are you – _here?_ ” Daud says, thankfully not reaching for me as I steady myself and back up against the rafters. No one in Stilton’s garden in 1849 has heard the commotion; Stilton is still pacing, back and forth and back and forth. Daud stares at me like I’m a ghost; I stare at him back, heart racing and palms sweaty.

“It’s a long story,” I say tersely, bitter and extremely pissed off, rubbing my neck. The shallow cut stings like a bitch; my hand comes away with blood.

“Tell me,” he says.

“It’s complicated.”

“ _Tell me_. Does Corvo know you’re –”

“What does it matter?” I bite out, kneeling again in the rafters to peer out through the wooden slats to watch Stilton. On the table is the notebook I need – the one with the combination code that will get me into the study where Delilah’s circle performed the ritual that brought her back. “I’m here for the same reason you are. Delilah.”

“You know about Delilah.”

It’s not a question. He’s still watching me with those hard eyes of his, analysing every inch of me, as though I’m some sort of trick, or trap. Maybe one of Delilah’s witches, putting on an elaborate disguise. Or maybe, I suppose he’s considering, I really _am_ Emily Kaldwin, who decided to abandon her throne for a stalking holiday in Serkonos.

“She staged a coup and took my throne,” I say.

Daud stays silent.

“I said –”

“I heard what you said,” he grits out.

It isn’t an easy thing, convincing someone that time travel is real when they already think you’re a trick or a trap or completely mad, and that’s without going into the fact that I shouldn’t even be _talking_ to Daud, let alone having made the mistake of willing myself into the past just so that he could hold a sword to my neck. What have I changed, simply by being here and speaking to the man who has uprooted my life more times than I care to count? Have I already altered the past and changed the present?

This could ruin everything. Cause a paradox. I might return to a foreign future – not that the one I left behind was especially stellar, of course, but for all I know this could be making things worse. But it’s done now. I can’t take this back. All I can do is be as vague with information as possible, because whatever happens to Daud, however Delilah returns, happens tonight – and I’m a part of it now.

Maybe I’ve _always_ been a part of it.

I sigh, my head aching, and I move to rub my eyes. But Daud’s reflexes are still sharp and startling. He snatches my left hand and yanks the band off, exposing my Mark and scowling deeply. I pull my hand back, covering it up again.

“When,” he demands, voice a low and dangerous growl.

“After the coup.”

“There hasn’t _been_ a –!”

“Yours isn’t working either, is it?” I demand. “The magic is wrong here, and it’s because of what Delilah did three years ago. _Tonight_.”

“Emily…”

“I’m not insane,” I tell him, quite bluntly. “The Outsider sent me here for the same reason you’re here – to figure out what Delilah is up to. Or in my case, figuring out how she returned.”

"Returned," he says, equally blunt.

I narrow my eyes. “I find it amusing, by the way,” I say, not amused in the slightest, “that you had relatively little difficulty killing my mother, but an awful lot of trouble ending the life of a madwoman intent on possessing me fifteen years ago.”

“Twelve,” Daud snaps, and snatches up his sword to sheathe it, kneeling beside me in the rafters, his entire aura stiff and agitated.

“Twelve for you,” I tell him. “Fifteen for me.”

“And where exactly am I, in this future of yours?”

…I don’t think I should get into that just yet.

“Someone’s touchy tonight,” I mutter instead.

Daud stares at me for a long time. “I’m having a bad evening,” he finally says gruffly, and looks away.

“Yes, well,” I say, “between you, me and Stilton, that makes three of us having a bad evening."

"Stilton?"

"Whatever happens tonight drives him insane. Batista is a dust-drowned ruin three years from now, and Luca Abele runs the mines."

Daud blinks.

"Stay here," I order. "I need the code from his notebook –”

“Seven-three-eight,” Daud says, squinting blearily down at the pacing Stilton – then calmly loads his wristbow with sleep darts, and shoots Stilton in the neck, his aim steady and true.

I watch in horror as Stilton grabs at the bolt in his neck then staggers, slumping down to the floor of his pavilion. “You _idiot_ ,” I snarl, rounding on Daud as the guards raise the alarm. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? What you might have _changed?_ ”

“I don’t know if you’re lying or mad, but that man,” Daud says as we move through the rafters and towards the upper balcony, “is the only thing stopping Luca Abele from destroying this city.”

“It _is_ destroyed. You can’t just fuck around with the past –”

“ _This isn’t the past_ ,” he snaps, and from a certain point of view, he’s correct – 1849 _isn’t_ the past, not for him.

I rub my aching eyes, wanting nothing more than to return to the _Dreadful Wale_ and collapse on my bunk and sleep for two days straight. “Don’t touch anything else. I don’t know what it’ll do.”

I notice him watching me closely, a frown creasing his forehead.

“You’re older,” he says.

“I’m twenty-five.”

“You’re really from – the future?” He still sounds dubious, but at least he’s open to the possibility.

“Technically, you’re in the past,” I point out. “1852 is my present.”

Daud shakes his head, still obviously finding it difficult to deal with all of this, and turns away to gruffly reload his crossbow. “You didn’t answer me before. Where am I in your future?”

“I don’t know,” I snap. “You left for Serkonos and you never came home.”

Daud stills, processing this information, while I sit here and silently swear at myself for letting that information slip out.

“I’m getting on the next ship to Dunwall first thing in the morning," he finally replies.

What _would_ happen if Daud got on that boat on the 17th Day of the Month of Rain in 1849? If he came home and told me and Corvo about Delilah and the threat she posed? Would all of this have been avoided and I’d be in Dunwall instead right now, lounging through life without a care? Would Alexi still be alive?

He won’t be on that ship, though. Something is going to happen tonight – I can feel it. And even if it doesn’t, even if he doesn't get the chance, I know I _can’t_ let him board a ship first thing tomorrow morning three years in the past, because it will change everything. Maybe for the better, but knowing my life – knowing this fucking world the way I do – it’ll probably be for the absolute worst.

“Whatever,” I mutter, and slip towards the balcony door.

Daud seizes my arm, yanking me back, his expression. “What do you mean I never –”

“I can’t tell you anything else.”

“ _Emily_ ,” he growls.

The balcony is cleared of guards, who have all rushed to the lower garden to check on Aramis. I jump out of Daud’s reach and march across the balcony, in 1849.

“Are you coming?” I snap over my shoulder.

The former Knife of Dunwall, my missing-and-assumed-dead Spymaster, blunted with age and regret, glares – then begins to follow, a limp in his walk, as I lead him to what will presumably be his doom.

I clench my eyes shut, withholding the treacherous burn of tears.

* * *

**and a scowl on your face**

Time has no meaning in Aramis Stilton’s study. The Void itself seeps through the rip in the fabric of reality, like sand trickling down the stem of an hourglass but never emptying and never filling. The moment Daud and I step through the door to the study, I feel the world detach; as though I am no longer part of 1849 or even 1852, but watching it from afar on a projector screen. The world of the past merges with the world of now and the world of the future, casting what once was in shades of grey and black and white, flickering in and out of existence.

Daud is part of that past. He is cast in grey, becoming nothing more than another waking shadow in this study, alarmed when he can no longer see me. But the distraction is momentary; he presses himself up against the wall when he hears Delilah’s inner circle talking, scowling deeply and listening in on them. He can’t see me, and neither can Breanna Ashworth or Grim Alex or Jindosh or Luca Abele. They can’t touch me. No harm can come to me while I’m in this room.

That also means I can’t _stop_ anything. I can’t stop the ritual from taking place. That’s not why I’m here. The Outsider sent me to _watch_ – to _learn_. To find out what Delilah did to make herself immortal.

To find out what happened to Daud.

Grim Alex paces the room. “We risk _madness_ ,” she crows, then stops, sniffs the air, and growls, “An intruder!”

A former Knife of Dunwall without his Void-granted abilities might be able to overpower most, but he is no match for Alexandria Hypatia’s alter ego. Daud raises his wristbow but Grim Alex moves with unnatural speed and strength and subdues him instantly, buckling the knee that was permanently injured all those years ago while Ashworth and Jindosh laugh something about Daud’s _auspicious_ timing, and how _fitting_ it is that he should be here on tonight of all nights, and how Delilah will be _so pleased_ to see him again.

I can’t stop them from hauling Daud down into the ritual chamber. He is driven to his knees as they chant in a circle surrounded by candles; before them, a hideous, terrifying portrait of the witch herself, painted by her own hand years ago. In the painting she is wrought with the Void and thorned roses, a shadow of a crown upon her head, but it’s not just oil and brushstrokes. That thing – that painting – is _alive_. As they call Delilah back from the Void, Delilah’s painting _breathes_ , and the world opens with an agony that sears my Mark and rings in my ears.

What happens below in the ritual room was three years ago, but it is neither the past, nor real-time, as I watch Delilah emerge from her portrait, naked as the day she was born. Luca and Breanna catch her but do not clothe her, not yet; behind them, the shadow of Delilah in her portrait moves and smiles as though it’s alive as well.

“We have a gift for you, my Empress,” Luca tells Delilah, and Grim Alex shoves Daud down before her. He lands, painfully it seems, on his knees, grunting at the impact.

“The Mouse of Dunwall,” Deliliah coos. “I expected you to age far more poorly.”

“Palace life suits me,” Daud drawls, a sneer upon his face as he stands. “But you wouldn’t know what that’s like, would you, Copperspoon?”

Delilah brings Daud to his knees again, flaring his Mark. A cry of pain is torn from his throat and he’s frozen before her, immobilised by thorned vines wrapping around his arms and legs, straining against her hold. Delilah strikes him across the face one way then another, and laughs with Luca and Breanna and Jindosh and Grim Alex.

“How fitting you are here to witness my return from the prison you thought would hold _me_ ,” Delilah says. "I thought our duel was over."

"Release me, and I'll end it for good."

“Oh, Daud." Delilah smiles. "You made me stronger. For years I wandered the Void, lost and alone, until I was able to harness its power. I should be thanking you.”

“And I should have stilled your heart when I had the chance.”

“Indeed, for you will not have another. No sword can harm me now.”

“How about we test the theory first before you go around making grand statements?”

Delilah laughs; it’s echoed by her portrait, which cackles a cold, discordant sound that sours the air itself. “I spent _years_ in the Void imagining how I would make you suffer for what you did. You, the only man who ever bested me.”

She flares his Mark again and he cries out in agony, and raises her hand once more, then reconsiders, her smile of ice like frost in the air, copied by the painting that laughs behind her. She brings her hand down slowly to trail it across Daud’s jawline.

“I apologise for… _ruining_ your evening earlier,” Delilah says, and Daud glowers in disgust. “All that pent-up _frustration_. Allow me to make it up to you. One last dance, my dear assassin.”

He snarls and jerks his face away, but his body is held in place by the thorned vines wrapped around his arms and legs, pinpricks of blood seeping through his clothes. “ _N_ —”

She seizes his jaw and leans in close. “You belong to _me_ now,” she growls.

She makes quick work of him. She leaves him on the floor, a mess of nail scratches and bruises, thorned vine puncture wounds and clothes dishevelled, forgotten by her sycophants the moment the entertainment is over. Delilah allows Breanna to embrace her while Jindosh offers her a cloak for modesty.

At first I think Daud has passed out from pain, or blood loss, but where he is slumped on the floor, I see the movement in his jaw, the clench of his brow, that betrays him as conscious. _Get up_ , I think. _Get up, get out, get out now_.

He doesn’t move.

This is where he dies, I realise. Delilah kills him tonight, this is what Jindosh tried to tell me what happened to Daud.

“Keep my soul safe, Luca,” Delilah says.

“With my life, Delilah.”

_Get up_ , I think again. _Get up!_

Daud can’t hear me, but he turns his head to the side and quietly spits out a mouthful of blood.

“Wait,” Delilah says suddenly, sharply, and the hilt of my sword is in my hand until I calm myself and remember that none of this can hurt me – physically, anyway.

Delilah turns about the room, her dark eyes glinting, and she pins her expression on me. _Through_ me. My blood runs cold.

“You are here. You are hidden, but I know who you are…” The portrait behind her grins and adds, “ _little sparrow_.”

Daud, forgotten by Delilah and the others on the floor, loads his wristbow with a trembling hand. He stops. Stares at his hands. Breathes.

They still.

“And I know _when_ you are."

The steadiest hands in all of Serkonos.

"You’ve come to watch me return. And someday, I’ll come for _yo—_ ”

A hardbolt slams into her chest with a _thunk_ , knocking her backwards. Ashworth cries out and Grim Alex snarls while Abele and Jindosh catch Delilah as she staggers, clutching her breast and steadily dragging the bolt from her sternum the way she pulled Corvo’s sword from her heart.

And Daud – Daud is halfway up the stairs, fleeing for his life.

* * *

When I was ten years old, I almost fell to my death. A man in a mask of death saved my life.

I should have realised immediately that the man wearing my father’s mask was not Corvo. Father never wore gloves, and never wore a red jacket either, but in my defence I was a little distracted by Havelock’s arm around my throat and the lurch behind my stomach as he pulled us both over the edge.

I have many clear impressions of the assassin Daud, and I despise the fact that none of them are compatible. Daud, driving a sword through my mother; Daud, grieving over the young man named Rulfio; Daud, shoving my father up against a wall and angling his head to deepen a kiss. Daud, handing me a loaded pistol, knowing full well I could shoot him through the heart and he wouldn’t try to defend himself.

Daud, his hand reaching out to grasp mine.

Three years ago, he ran for the door while Delilah screeches.

“ _I cast you in cold –_ ”

Reality splits and I feel the cold tendrils of the Void swirl around me, and the Outsider’s voice hisses in my ear – _Now ! –_ and Daud becomes _real_.

There is no time to be graceful.

I throw my hand out to reach for Daud, his life a few precious moments away from ending forever, trapped in marble in this room that’s bleeding into the Void for all eternity, and his hand blindly meets mine, gripping hard, my shaking hand capturing his. I grab the time piece and _pull_ , squeezing us both back through the tear in the Void, and Delilah’s scream echoes out in the past until it fades from ringing in my ears.

Daud and I stagger together and hit the floor as I drag him across time to safety. He crashes beside me, breathing hard, shaking and shivering but _alive_. _Here_.

In 1852.

* * *

**this miserable place**

“Daud—” I start to say, and he coughs hard, obviously winded, cringing from my touch and staggering to his feet to get away from me, twisting on the spot with his wristbow at the ready. I flinch when he aims it at me, though he drops it almost instantly.

“What did you do to me?” he gasps hoarsely.

“I just saved your life,” I say, tying my scarf around the lower half of my face and standing shakily.

It's as though he's barely processing I'm here. He twists on his heel, eyes darting around like a wolf on the hunt, its ears spiking at every little noise to locate its prey. Or the human hunting him. “Where is –”

“It’s over, Daud,” I say, approaching him. “What happened in that room –”

“ _Don’t –_ ”

“– that was three years ago. Delilah is in Dunwall, sitting on my throne. You’re – safe.”

Relatively speaking.

He stares at me, still not comprehending. Down the other end of the corridor, a plate shatters on the floor accompanied by the startled scream of a serving maid who has just spotted two strangers in Aramis Stilton’s house. I blink, looking around at the mansion – no longer a decrepit, dust-drowned cesspit of a bloodfly breeding ground, no longer dank with the stench of rotting food and wet fur of starving, savage hounds or choked with thick dust. The magic is still perverted here; I can’t tap into the Void. But this isn’t the mansion I entered a few scant hours ago. It smells fresh, clean; the distant sound of the piano plays on the other side of the house and the place murmurs with life, the plants pruned and the corridors shining as beautifully as they did in the past.

Aramis Stilton didn’t witness the ritual. He never went insane.

Daud doesn’t seem to notice anything, not yet. He shakes his head and moves away from me, limping through the house and leaving a trail of blood in his wake, and ignoring the maid who urges us to leave or she’ll call for help.

“Where are you going?” I demand.

“I have to – warn Corvo,” Daud mutters, glancing at a clock on the mantelpiece as he staggers through Aramis Stilton’s home. “There’s time. I can – still make the boat. And _you_ –”

“Daud –”

“– you’re coming with me. Right now, back to Dunwall, to explain all of this –”

“Daud!”

He rounds on me. “ _What_.”

I swallow, but lift my chin and meet his gaze. “There’s no boat,” I tell him. “It’s 1852.”

I’ve never wanted to be someone else, _anyone_ else, as much as I do right now. _What did you do to me_ , Daud had asked, and I’m not certain I want to confess to the magnitude of what’s just happened. That three years ago, he vanished from the face of this world, and everyone but Corvo thought he was dead. That Corvo lost another person he loved, that I lost my Spymaster who could have alerted us to Delilah’s plans, that Thomas lost the use of his legs when Daud vanished and the Arcane Bond broke because _I_ yanked him through time itself – all of this on top of what he’s just been through.

It’s cruel.

But he deserves to know. He, more than anyone, deserves to hear the ugly truth from my mouth, on what I can only imagine must be one of the worst days of his life.

“I told you,” I say, quietly, when he doesn't respond. “What happened in that room happened three years ago.”

“No.”

“Daud –”

“I can’t be.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You had no right,” he chokes out, face pale. “I’m supposed to be on that ship. I have to warn Corvo. Protect _you_. I was supposed to –” He breaks off and turns, storming his way through the manor. “A few weeks. I said I’d only be gone a few weeks.”

“Look," I say, half-jogging after him, a rambling speech erupting from my throat before I can control it. "Just – come with me, okay? I’ll even take you back to a ship. The _Dreadful Wale_. I have some friends waiting for me. They’ll want to see you. We can – figure things out there, and –”

“Go with _you_?” Daud snaps, almost kicking open the front doors of Stilton’s mansion. The sunlight streams down and hits his face, making him grimace, blinking in confusion because for him, a mere few minutes ago, it was barely past midnight. “Why would I go with _you_?”

“You don’t have many other options at the moment.”

"Yeah, well, we'll see about that," Daud growls, stomping off towards the Dust District. With his back turned I can pull out the time piece, but instead of whirring and showing the past through the mirror, it lies dead and heavy like a lump of coal in my hands.

That's it, then.

I shove the piece away and sprint after Daud. “Hey!” I snap, halting him. “I just saved your worthless life. Some gratitude would be appreciated.”

“I’ve just had a really long, really _fucked up evening_ ,” Daud snarls, “so forgive me if I’m not feeling a little more _grateful_ at the moment.”

He's… never spoken to me like that before. Ever.

Anger flares. “I didn’t _have_ to save you –” I snap.

“If you didn’t have to save me then _send me back!_ ”

“I can’t!” I cry. “And even if I could, what would you do? If not for me you’d probably be a marble statute right now and Delilah would have stuck you next to Corvo to make a matching set!”

Daud stares at me. “ _What?_ ”

Oh.

I… I didn’t tell him.

“Corvo," I say. "Delilah – she tore the Mark from his hand and turned him into a statute. That’s why I’m here, and he… isn’t.”

It’s not always easy to read emotions on Daud’s face, but the stricken expression flares across his features so openly I realise he’s probably barely just holding himself together.

“Is he –” he says, stumbling over asking if Corvo is dead.

I press my lips together and march on ahead, ready to get the hell out of Stilton’s manor. “I don’t know.”

“What you mean you don’t know?” Daud snaps, catching my arm and yanking me back to face him. I snatch my arm out of his grip. “ _Is he alive_?”

“What part of _I don’t know_ are you having difficulty comprehending?”

He swears and turns away, pressing a hand to his forehead.

I exhale. “Look,” I say. “You’re – hurt. We have supplies on the ship. You can – patch yourself up, rest –”

He barks a laugh and it turns into a pained groan. He doubles over and spits out another mouthful of blood. The cuts and wounds are already seeping blood through his clothes. “Don’t pretend to care. I’ve been through worse.”

“Fine,” I snap.

The Batista we step into is not the Dust District I left behind. I thought it a rotting skeleton mere hours ago; drowning in silver dust, the bloodflies breeding from the corpses littering the streets. Stilton’s sanity has done more than restore his manor – in the last three years while the Duke and Delilah plotted to steal my throne, Stilton protected the people of this town better than I could even protect my own citizens. The streets are clean, devoid of the mountains of dust from the mines that were being drained for all they were worth. Rats and bloodflies don’t swarm the cobbles or the air.

There isn’t a single body in sight.

Daud doesn’t say a single word as we make our way through the district without needing to hide from guards. It’s possible he doesn’t notice; though this can't be what the place looked like three years ago when he came through it, he's not focusing on much of anything at the moment. But I notice. I can smell the difference in the air itself, which no longer carries the scent of death and rot but rather smells more like fresh fruit and warm baked bread. The people don’t shuffling along with their heads turned down and their shoulders curled in; they stride through the city, talking and laughing together, loitering around an obscene gold statue of the old Duke, erected by Stilton himself.

Luca is still the Duke. His announcements, increasingly irritated from being unable to abuse the miners as he did in the old timeline, echo about the city, but few pay attention except for the miner’s union. Most tellingly, the Overseers and the Howlers aren’t slaughtering each other in the streets. There is no partitioning of the city, no gang war, no graffiti scrawled over the buildings. Whatever Byrne and Paolo are up to, they are not at war with each other.

Daud was right to save Stilton from insanity.

I don’t say this, though. I don’t know how to put it into words without sounding trite. Daud’s jaw is clenched as tightly as a vice and he strides alongside me agitatedly, unamused and unaware of my internal struggle.

I’m spared the necessity of an apology or an admission that he did the right thing by reaching the skiff. I’ve never been gladder to see Meagan waiting for us, though something about her is different and I can’t work it out.

“Daud,” I say, gesturing to Meagan, “this is Meagan Foster. She helped me escape Dunwall. Meagan –”

“…Daud?” Meagan Foster whispers, deathly pale, and at first I think it’s fear. The Knife of Dunwall’s reputation, like many other things in this world, slipped into obscurity but didn’t truly fade from the memories of all who reside there, no matter how far from his former life he’d run. But the expression on her face isn’t one of terror at being faced with Dunwall’s greatest assassin. It’s recognition.

“You know each other?” I ask.

Daud’s lips thin; he doesn’t reply.

Meagan’s eyes are wide. Both eyes, I realise. The deep scar that defined her face is gone, replaced with skin that isn’t necessarily smooth but definitely unmarred by the chronic pain that laced her whole body.

…Her arm. She has both of her arms. Void. How much has _changed?_

“We… did,” Meagan says unevenly. “A long time ago. I don’t understand. I thought – we all thought Daud was dead. Where – _how_ –”

“I’ll explain later.”

“But –”

“ _Later_ ,” I repeat, and Meagan falls silent.

I need time to figure out how to explain… everything.

The trip over to the _Dreadful Wale_ is a terse, awkward affair. Meagan tells me that Anton has been keeping himself occupied with painting, not because this is important information to know but because she obviously feels the need to fill the silence, continually glancing at Daud as though yearning for some reactiong from him. I watch him too, waiting for a self-depreciating remark or a wry observation about the state of things, but Daud ignores the both of us steadfastly, sitting on the far end of the skiff with his jacket tugged around his shoulders and his face a dour expression, squinting against the spray of saltwater, the sunlight hard on his exhausted eyes.

“You’ll have to share a cabin with Thomas,” I tell him, glancing at Meagan as she steers us closer towards the ship. “The only other space is the cargo hold.”

“Thomas is here?” Daud says gruffly, the first time he’s spoken since throwing up.

“Yes,” Meagan Foster replies for me, stiffly. “He’s been travelling with me for almost three years now.”

Daud doesn’t acknowledge her. I know he heard, though, because a muscle in his jaw tenses.

“He’ll be glad to see you,” I say. “But there’s something you should know. When you disappeared –”

Daud pinches the bridge of his nose.

That was disingenuous of me. I keep saying that – three years ago. When you disappeared. When you vanished. You never came home. The last hollow three years with Corvo’s grief, the Whalers’ devastation, my own fury and rage and despair… none of that exists for Daud. Not yet. He’s still living in 1849, a few weeks away from his fight with Corvo and fresh out of the night that changed everything and started this mess.

And that’s on my shoulders.

“…When I pulled you through time,” I correct, quietly, “we realised something had happened to you three years ago because the Arcane Bond with your Whalers was severed.”

Silence. Only the roar of the motor as Meagan pulls up against the side of the ship, tying it up swiftly with both hands to lift the skid. When I saw her restored limb, no longer lost in a fight to see Aramis Stilton because Aramis Stilton was now sane and could speak for himself, I admit I _hoped_ that meant Thomas would no longer be confined to a wheelchair. If the Dust District was again Batista – had _never_ declined to the state it was in during the original timeline – and if Meagan never lost her arm because she didn't need to fight her way through guards to reach Stilton, then perhaps other things could be fixed as well.

But that’s wishful thinking. I ripped Daud out of 1849 and brought him to 1852 – he didn’t _exist_ for three years. The Arcane Bond the moment I pulled him through time. If that's changed, Meagan says nothing to the contrary.

“Severed?” Daud murmurs, pushing himself up and ignoring Meagan’s hand to help him across the gap between the skid and the ship’s deck.

“There was an accident. He –”

Daud stops listening. He’s frozen instead, one foot on the deck, staring straight ahead at the younger man in a wheelchair.

“The Bond,” Thomas chokes. “It – came back.”

Daud stares, his eyes taking in everything about his second – from the difference in appearance to the tears streaming down Thomas’s face when the Whaler had rarely allowed himself to commit such a public display of emotion to the wheelchair he’s inching down the deck towards us as though afraid to come any closer.

“Barely an hour ago. I thought – I didn’t want to believe –” Thomas gasps for air. “You’re really here? You’re alive?”

Daud staggers forwards, halting himself before Thomas. “Thomas,” he manages to say, voice strained, and it’s a wonder he doesn’t fall to his knees.

“Void,” Thomas says, voice breaking and fists clenching around the bars of his wheelchair. “I never wanted you to see me like this, Daud. I –”

“What _happened?_ ”

“I told you,” I say, approaching cautiously when it becomes clear that Thomas is too overwhelmed, silent tears slipping down his face, to explain. “The Arcane Bond severed. Thomas was mid-transversal. He fell, and –”

It’s as though something snaps sharply into place; the final piece to the puzzle he’d been missing. Daud’s face, exhausted and drained and pale, aching for sleep and devastatingly confused, turns stormy.

Murderous.

“You,” he growls, advancing on me. “ _You_ _did this_.”

I can’t help it. I step backwards, heart pounding in terror. “If I hadn't, you'd be dead or worse!”

This makes him stop, though whether it’s the realisation of his own mortality and how close he was to losing his life and mind or the thought that he'd prefer I'd left him to his fate to spare Thomas, it’s difficult to know. He stares at me, breathing raggedly; behind him, Thomas's knuckles are white around the handles, and Meagan watches all of this unfold from a distance. Finally Daud growls, then turns and stomps away, leaving me, Thomas and Meagan in his wake.

I should let him go, but can't stop myself from demanding, “Where are you going?”

“ _To catch up on THREE FUCKING YEARS OF SLEEP!_ ”

There’s nothing I can really retort with to that. As he storms off, I aim my mother’s heart at the man who stilled it fifteen years ago.

**_He has… so many regrets_** , she whispers. **_You are one of his greatest._**

* * *

**the dust it blows**

“Look around you. A crumbling island at the edges of the Void. But this one is special. It’s the place where my throat was cut, four thousand years ago. This is where my life ended, and where it began again.”

Neither Corvo nor Daud ever held the Outsider in any deification regard; Corvo spoke of the leviathan as a friend, or an acquaintance – Daud of an annoyance, a meddling bastard, as though a bitter ex-boyfriend. Even before their respective influences on the way I considered the old faith and the Abbey’s denial that the Void and the Outsider and other heretical things like magic do not and should not exist, I too never thought of the Outsider as a god that I should worship.

But there’s something awfully disconcerting about finding out the Outsider was once as human as the rest of us. A lamb to the slaughter, a whale drained of its oil. It feels wrong to know this about him, and the Void in this sacred place feels even more distorted.

It feels like _Delilah_.

The Outsider reminds me of the ocean – of salt water, of the sound of whales singing gentle melodies, the way he vanishes into ash like the foam of a breaking wave dissolving across soft sand. This ancient place _should_ smell of cold granite and blood, but instead it smells of rotting roses. The ground beneath our feet is not just smooth black stone; it’s dirt, hosting a bed of thorned, rotting roses and twisted, gnarling trees erupting from the ground, knotting through the expanse and staining it as black as pitch.

Her vines have curled around the sacrificial slab, around the necks of the stone figures in prayer before the ritual site. The Outsider doesn’t touch any of it; he paces through the area with that cool look of disgust upon his face. I follow him, until the slab and the ancient ritual are behind us, and he has led us both to a frozen scene of the séance that brought Delilah back.

“At the end of her days Delilah drifted through the Void where Daud trapped her to save your life,” the Outsider continues. “She should have been lost forever. But her will and cunning are second to none. She found this place – the island in the Void where I became what I am. She tapped into the power here, becoming a part of the Void.”

“And a part of you,” I realise. “That’s how she can manipulate the Marks.”

The Outsider sneers. “My Mark is meant as a gift to those I consider special,” he says. “Intriguing. Daud was young once. Full of anger and raging against the universe. A sight to behold. But he became predictable, as so many of my Marked do, and lost my interest, until the day he regained it."

"When he killed Jessamine."

"No," the Outsider says.

I blink, surprised, but then the surprise gives way to realisation. Of course it wouldn't have just been my mother's murder that caught the Outsider's attention; why should it? Daud has killed enough people to float a whaling ship from all classes of society, from the lowest peasant to the highest. He took a contract, he was paid.

But _aftewards_. His trembling hands. Redemption in the form of stopping Delilah, or at least attempting to. The decision to don the Masked Felon's face when Corvo could not; the choice to save me when he could have walked away after Corvo spared his life in the Flooded District.

Jessamine's death changed both of us.

"The choices he made afterwards," I say.

The Outsider inclines his head. "Daud has always been… important to me.”

That last part sounded very difficult for him to admit.

“Have you ever said so to his face?” I cannot help but jab.

“Have you?” the Outsider shoots back.

I don’t know how to respond to that. “What Delilah made him do…” I say instead, and the Outsider vanishes in a rush of ash, reappearing on the edge of the island, his hands held behind his back and his cold, marble face unreadable. I approach him, and wait for him to speak.

“…It was a perversion,” he says, and the Void around us seems to cool in time with his voice. “A violation. The Mark was never intended for that. She had no right.” A pause. Then a bitter twist of his lips. “Daud always did call it a curse.”

"If I hadn't saved him –"

"I'm sure Delilah would have found it terribly amusing to name him her Royal Protector."

I can't stop the mental image of Daud in the throne room, eyes vacant and offering his hand to Delilah to help her out of the carriage, Corvo's grief right before Delilah compelled Daud to drive his sword through my father, from consuming my thoughts. 

I clench my eyes shut. “If Delilah has the power to – remove marks, what’s to stop her from doing the same to me?”

He grips my left hand, touch as cold as ice, and his other hand comes up to cover the Mark seared upon my skin. “Yours is different,” he murmurs. “Protected.”

I look down at where our hands meet. “…Thank you.”

He vanishes again, and I let my hand fall.

“You have to give Delilah credit,” the Outsider says, pacing now around a frozen Breanna Ashworth.

I flinch, being amongst these apparitions – Delilah, standing sans-clothes before the self-portrait she stepped from and left her spirit behind. Around her, three dead people and one walking corpse, and on the floor a man about to raise his wristbow with every intention of killing for the first time in twelve long years.

“She tore out a piece of her own soul and hid it inside a thing of canvas and oil paints, and now she’s made herself immortal. That’s no small feat. But everything has a price. For three years while she plotted against you, assured of her immortality, she spent every sleepless night with one eye open, looking over her shoulder. Even missing from time itself, Daud has haunted her dreams. She fears the day he’ll return to take his revenge.”

“It’s not him she should have been worried about,” I say.

The Outsider smirks.

“So what do I do?” I ask, disliking this line of conversation and preferring instead to focus on the portrait. “Burn the painting?”

“If only it were that simple, Empress. If you want to kill Delilah, you’re going to have to find her spirit and give it back to her.”

“How?”

“You’ll know how, when the time comes,” the Outsider says. “The question is, how will you cope with what comes afterwards? And will you be this city’s saviour, or will you be the one to push it over the edge?”

“What do you –”

There's a jolt and the Void melts away around me, and I'm in jerking awake in bed in the cabin of the _Dreadful Wale_ , my Mark stinging and the Heart that I keep safely hidden inside my shirt pocket hammering frantically against my chest. I pull it out, clasping it gently in my hands.

**_Can you feel it?_** The shadow of Jessamine’s voice whispers. ** _This is my last night…_**

“Mother?”

**_Soon I will dissolve into the great nothing… finally I will be at peace._ **

“I don’t understand.”

The thudding slows, until her voice barely more than a brush of wind.

**_…Set me free._ **

* * *

Daud sleeps for twenty straight hours.

“What’s wrong with him?” I demand, pacing the deck. “He’s almost slept for an entire day. Did he _die_ in there or something?”

There’s nothing else I can _do_ until he wakes up. Aramis Stilton left the ship after providing me with a map of the Duke’s palace. We cleared the storage room out while Daud slept, the man having crashed in Thomas’s cabin in lieu of any other compartment with a modicum of privacy available to him. Below deck, Anton is busy immortalising my face on canvas. I look cold in the portrait. Harsh. Beside Delilah’s painting, you could almost mistake me for her daughter. I didn’t want to stay down there. Now Meagan just stands sullenly against the railing, smoking and gazing out at the ocean while Thomas scowls at me heavily.

“Will you give him a _break?_ ” Thomas snaps, pushing himself forward in the chair which he’s oiled since the last time, as it barely squeaks at all. “He just lost three years of his life, got tortured by a witch, found out Attano is a statue – he’s been through enough without having you treat him as your punching bag too.”

I know. I do know this. I can’t erase from my mind the expression of pain on his face as Delilah tortured him.

But I’m still so – _angry_. And I know the perfect thing to channel it into.

“Start the briefing,” I mutter.

Meagan draws on her cigarette. “It won’t be easy getting inside the palace,” she says, while I pull out my telescope to peer at the hideous monstrosity that Luca Abele built, most likely to compensate for something. Duke Luca Abele tore down the original palace in Karnaca in order to build himself a lavish structure that cost enough to feed everyone in Serkonos for years. The new palace is said to be a sprawling estate to humble all others; a monument to his ego and entitlement. I remember the budget report that Daud passed along to my desk with a scowl – long before any construction began, which was completed in the three years during his disappearance – and suggested I get in touch with Luca to advise against this. I did not; mostly because, at the time, the silver was still flowing from Serkonos and there was no vocal civil discontent about it.

That, like everything else the Duke has done to Serkonos, happened while I was Empress. Safe in Dunwall, running across the rooftops and avoiding my responsibilities and letting my mother’s memory down, I was content to look the other way.

It’s remarkable people tolerate the Duke. But then, he has an army. He did have control of the mines, in an alternate world. And he has – _had_ – my support from the capital by default, because I looked the other way, hating my job while loving the privileges that came with it. Part of why I hated ruling was because of the rich nobles, sucking up to me while sucking on crab and carving up the empire for their own little games. But for all that I went through, with Jessamine’s death and the following six months, I didn’t grow up like my father did, or the way Daud did. They were born into abject poverty, had to fight to survive almost every single day of their lives. I know Meagan had a difficult childhood too – while she was growing up in the slums she would watching the lights from the lavish parties raging in the Tower. I covered my face with a scarf to escape and play games sprinting across rooftops to escape the toadies and the rats plying to get into my good graces or to marry their wealthy child off to me, but at the end of the day I could always come back to the Tower, to a warm bed and a hot, healthy meal and clean clothes and a shower.

I’ve taken… so much for granted. I’ve started laying the groundwork for fixing things. But after this is done, I need to do better. To _be_ better.

“I’ve been inside a dozen palaces and hundreds of mansions,” I murmur, putting the telescope away. “They’re all the same. I’ll find a way in.”

“Getting in and dealing with Luca is only part of the puzzle,” Meagan reminds me, as though I’d forgotten. “You also need to find whatever it is he’s hiding for Delilah.”

I nod. “Right.”

“I’ll start preparing the skiff,” Meagan says.

“I’ll go check on –”

“Empress,” Thomas says, sharply, and I notice him looking over on the other end of the ship – where Daud, sometime in the last five minutes, emerged from below deck and is now pacing, clearly agitated and ignoring us.

“I’ll go,” I say, throat tight, and make my way over. He doesn’t acknowledge my approach straight away, not until I’m within reaching distance of him. “You’re awake.”

Daud halts his pacing, just long enough to glance up at me while he flicks a lighter. From the corner of his mouth hangs a cigarette. _Click. Click._

“Anton caught me up on – the last three years,” Daud says, gruffly. “Some of it, anyway.”

“Finally accepted it, have you?”

Daud glowers. “You must have some allies in Dunwall still,” he says, ignoring my testy remark. _Click. Click. Click._ His hands are trembling again, and this time, he can't steady them. “Alexi –”

“Alexi is dead,” I say bluntly.

His entire demeanour changes. “Emily,” he says, taking the cigarette from his mouth, brow pinched into a deep frown of despair. I turn away. “Emily, I’m sorry.”

Not as sorry as I am.

He sighs when I don’t speak. “Jasper, then. The Overseers will be invaluable against the witches.”

“I hope so.”

He rubs his forehead. “I can convene with Stride –”

“Lizzy Stride is dead, too,” I say. “Two years ago. The Hatters finally did the Eels in – they rule the streets now.”

It’s Daud’s turn to fall silent. The absence of speech bites the air painfully, and I wish I hadn’t said anything at all.

“Rinaldo?” he finally says. “Kent? Tynan? Feodor?”

“Feodor was with the Overseers. Rinaldo was in the palace when the coup happened. I don’t know if he got out or not.”

He returns to his lighter, fitting the cigarette back between his lips.

“I don’t know about the other two.”

_Click. Click. Click._

I purse my lips. “Do you need me to –”

“I’ve got it,” Daud growls around the cigarette. He finally lights it and inhales deeply. He draws on the cigarette in silence and I stand to his left. After several long minutes, he offers the cigarette to me.

I take it.

“How do you know Meagan?” I ask, inhaling then passing it back.

“Old acquaintance.”

“She said she knew Ashworth and Delilah, back in the day. Was she one of their witches? In on the plot to possess me?”

Daud puffs on the cigarette. “You’d have to ask her.”

“I’m asking you.”

He inhales again, very deeply this time. “It’s not my confession to make.”

I take the cigarette from him before he’s done. “Can I trust her?”

“You can’t trust anyone except for yourself, Empress,” Daud says, watching me exhale smoke to the side. “And you’re asking the wrong question.”

“What’s the question I should be asking?”

“Why she's helping you.”

“Unspecified guilt she is attempting to atone for?” I guess. “It seems to be the common theme amongst my allies.”

The corner of Daud’s mouth curves at this, then fades very quickly.

When he says nothing further on the matter, I huff. “Whatever,” I say. “I have a Duke to reckon with.”

“Be careful with how you deal with him,” Daud advises before I head towards Meagan who has been waiting for me, either patiently or nervously and away from where Daud stands and continues to ignore her. Daud turns, leaning over the railing once more. “Luca isn’t a mad inventor or a doctor or a witch. He’s the ruler of a nation. I hope you have more of a plan than just to butcher him the way you took care of the others.”

“They crossed me the wrong way. They threatened the stability of my rule. I made sure they knew the consequences. I’ll deal with the Duke however I see fit.”

I can only see the edge of Daud’s expression. I can’t read it, but whatever it is, it twists something sharply inside of me, a thud of dread.

I flick the cigarette over the side of the boat. "You shouldn't smoke," I say, Daud's eyes following it where it disappears into the water. "Those will kill you one day."

“It’s addictive, isn’t it?” he asks.

"It was disgusting."

"Not the cigarette."

I still.

“That rush of power that floods your veins like fire,” he continues, “every time you take someone else’s life.”

“Killing is easy once you start?” I drawl, adjusting my weapons. “Spare me the lecture, Daud. I’m doing what’s necessary.”

“Are you?” he asks.

I turn and storm off towards the skiff.

* * *

Delilah’s self-portrait is a thing of nightmares.

It is larger than anything of hers I’ve seen so far in my travels; larger than any of Anton’s portraits. Its frame is pure silver, mined from the depths of Karnaca and carved and moulded into twisted thorned vines and flowers. It’s a harsh mixture of black and red, and abstract portrayal of Delilah Copperspoon, one with the Void and emerging from the roses with a snarl upon her face and a faint crown upon her head. Her eyes are feral, intense, following me in the hidden chamber of Luca Abele’s palace. Above me, the sirens begin to wail – they’ve discovered his body. Delilah’s portrait doesn’t know, or care. Her teeth bared into a vicious grin, mocking me, as I stand before her, drenched with royal blood.

None of it is mine.

“ _Little sparrow_ ,” Delilah’s painting whispers.

I ignore her, and pull out the Outsider’s gift.

**_This is it_** , my mother’s cage of flesh and steel whispers, the wires cutting into my skin with every heavy beat. ** _You must release me from this dead vessel. Free me of this poisoned world. Only then will you be able to trap Delilah’s spirit._**

I knew this is what I’d have to do. Some part of me knew. Every time I pulled the Heart out to listen to the secrets of the people of this city; every time she gave me the information I needed to weed out the good from the bad, the innocent from the monsters. But I find myself shaking my head, blinking back a burn of agonised tears. “I can’t,” I say. “You’re all I ever wanted. Mother –”

**_Let me go. I stayed as long as I could… to try and guide you. But I’ve seen too much of this world._ **

One heartbeat. Two heartbeats.

**_…There is blood on your hands._ **

No. I don't want her to say this.

“I did it for you,” I tell her, pleading with the shadow of my mother’s spirit to understand. “To win back your throne. To keep your legacy.”

**_Emily… my darling… I love you. But let me go._ **

“Mother…”

I feel the Heart shudder, its beating slowing and its vibrant red begins to fade in time with her voice, slipping away into the abyss forever.

**_My daughter… you are becoming the monster he tried to bury._ **

* * *

**the silver it glows**

**_Jessamine is gone at last, faded into nothing. Her reward is peace._ **

Squeeze.

**_You will never gain back what you lost here._ **

Squeeze.

**_You are alone now. I'm your only family._ **

I grip it so viciously that spasms, the barbed wire cutting through the fabric wound around my left hand and drawing blood. I almost drop the poisoned lump of flesh on the deck and kick it over into the grimy water of the docks I fled from months ago, because no matter how tightly I've squeezed it overthe two weeks it took for the _Dreadful Wale_ to cross the ocean from Serkonos to Dunwall, it only speaks with Delilah's voice; that harsh, seductive coo instead of –

**_She despised you, in the end._ **

It felt like an eternity. Now that I’m here, all I want to do is run away again.

I can’t, though. There’s nowhere left for me _to_ run. The ruins of Dunwall – the destruction that Delilah has left in the wake of her brutal reign – is the end of the line. There’s only one way out of here: Meagan – _Billie Lurk_ – is the only one who can commandeer this ship, but I’m not about to ask _her_ to take me anywhere.

_Dreadful Wale_. I can’t believe I didn’t realise it sooner. I can’t believe I was so _blind_.

When Daud reaches the deck, where I’m waiting by the skiff for him, I shove the Heart away, not that he’d have seen it anyway. My fingers clench it instinctively.

**_There are marks on our flesh. Made by the Knife of Dunwall. Cursed Daud, who hid from time itself and breathes still._ **

“Are you ready?” he asks, gruff.

I press my lips together into a fine line, because on that part, at least, Delilah and I agree upon. “Yes,” I say stiffly, the first word I’ve said to him in two weeks, and turn towards the skiff.

“Answer something, before we go.”

“What.”

“How many people have you killed?”

I freeze, then twist on my heel to meet his gaze head-on. “Excuse me?”

He doesn’t need to repeat himself, and I –

…I don’t know. I stopped counting sometime after – after Jindosh. How many since then? I barely recall what it felt like to take a life in the form of a shadow, stalking sneering soldiers along alleyways before snatching them and silencing them – they’re all an ashen blur. And including or not including the people whose lives I threaded together with the touch of the Void, linking their fates and watching them all collapse at the same time, their blackened hearts stilled in unison? Forty? Fifty?

_More?_

“Why?” I demand, to cover for my brief moment of paralysed horror. “How many people have _you_ killed?”

He gazes at me, for a long, disquieting moment. Then he says, with blatant unsubtlety, “I lost count.”

I don’t want to see his expression – that pitying, judgemental look that colours his eyes with an understated grief, as though he’s hurt over all of this. It just pisses me off. “Then you don’t get to talk, or judge,” I say. “Least of all for keeping Billie Lurk’s secret.”

There's a beat of silence. It's not a guilty one, just a knowing one, and that pisses me off even more.

“She said it was the ‘least she owed me’,” I continue, bitter, when he says nothing. “As that somehow makes things, what – even between us? Fuck her.”

I should have worked it out. I should have _realised_. I never saw her face, the one who held me back as Daud drove a sword through my mother; the one who vanished into air with me, the one who approached Daud afterwards when he was staring at his bloodied hands to ask him if everything was all right. I remember I was screaming - for Jessamine, for Corvo, for them to let me go - and Daud told the Whaler in a red jacket like his to "shut the girl up". 

Shut me up she did. Sleep toxin, I think. I don't remember much after that; I woke up in the Golden Cat an unspecified number of hours or days later. But I'll always remember the grip around my arm, the tug of a transversal.

I _should have known._ I shake my head, and point at him. “And fuck you, and Thomas, and Anton for not telling me who she was. What she did.”

“Billie didn’t kill your mother, Emily,” Daud growls, voice like gravel.

“She as good as killed Jessamine, and then some!” I snap. “It wasn’t enough for her to be the one to hold me back as I watched you kill my mother – she had to join Delilah’s coven too and almost ruined my life twice over! You let me trust her!”

“I didn’t _let_ you do anything. I’ve always told you never to trust anyone but yourself. It’s not my fault you never listened.”

“So I suppose none of this was your fault either?” I bite out. “If you’d told me and Corvo about Delilah years ago, we could have avoided all of it.”

“If you’d left me in 1849, _I_ might have been able to escape to come back to warn you.”

“None of this would be happening at all if you'd killed Delilah when you should have! Do you _enjoy_ periodically destroying my life?”

“I’ve been content to act as your scapegoat for twelve years but I can only take credit for so much,” Daud replies coldly. “It’s cute that you think personal responsibility doesn’t apply to you. Perhaps I shouldn’t have bothered with stopping Delilah’s ritual at all, since I doubt anyone would’ve been able to tell the difference between you and her anyw—”

I backhand him, the sound of flesh striking flesh echoing across the deck. Daud grunts, barely staggering under the blow, but when he looks back up I see the corner of his eye bleeding, his skin sliced by the sharp edge of my signet ring. I stand there, breathing hard, my whole body trembling.

“How dare you.” My voice shakes. “How _dare you_ –”

“That was – wrong of me,” he murmurs. “I shouldn’t have –”

Shouldn’t have what – done the one thing that I’ve always relied on him to do and told the _truth?_ That the only thing separating me from Delilah are the circumstances of our births, my legitimacy and her illegitimacy? My hand comes up again with the intention to strike Daud again, and again and again until I make his face bleed more, but then I remember Delilah striking him in that godawful room and bending him to her will and instead I realise my hand has not stopped shaking. It falters, slamming down in a fist against his chest as I pitch forwards, a deep sob emerging from some deep, long-forgotten place inside of me. He freezes, his arms awkwardly hovering above my shaking shoulders, and my hand fists in his jacket, clutching it hard.

“I hate you,” I weep, my other fist hitting his chest even as bury my face in his jacket. “I _hate_ you. None of this would be happening if mother was still alive.”

He stays silent.

“It’s your fault she’s dead,” I cry. “It’s your fault that this is happening. I never asked for this, I didn’t want this, I didn’t want _any of this_ –”

I feel his hands meet my shoulders, then wrap around me, pulling me close. I don’t want this. I don’t want his touch, I don’t want his embrace, surely no more than he wants mine if I remind him so damn much of Delilah, but I can’t bring myself to pull away. I seize the lapels of his jacket, my tears staining the fabric.

“I want Jessamine,” I cry, tears blurring my vision. “I want my mother.”

“I know.”

"She hated me. Before I let her go, she hated me -"

Daud's hold on me tightens.

"- I only wanted to -"

"I know."

“You don’t know, you have _no idea what this is like_ –”

“You feel like everything you know, everything you were so sure of, was a lie,” he murmurs. “You feel like your world is ending, like you could throw yourself off the side of this boat and just let the water drag you under until everything stops hurting. Every time you close your eyes you see your mother’s body and you feel the rage burning through your veins until it runs its course and all that’s left is ash.”

_There is blood on your hands._

“Damn you," I choke. "I’m nothing like you, I don’t want to be anything like you. You weren’t there for me. You weren’t there when I needed you, you let me become –”

_– the monster he tried to bury –_

“Who’s fault was that?” he murmurs, not unkindly, and despite everything I hear myself release a choking laugh, clutching his jacket tighter with hands that won’t stop shaking.

“Yours."

Mine. All mine. All of this, it's always been my fault. For making a choice to be angry, and choosing that every single day for so long that it became a mere fact of my existence and reality. For neglecting the people who trusted me. For keeping Daud and Corvo apart. For letting my mother down. For letting all of this happen when if I'd just been a little kinder, a little more attentive, if I'd tried to be like Jessamine – 

"You left without telling us where you were going, or what you were leaving for. You didn’t even say _goodbye_ –”

“Emily. Look at me.”

“No.”

“ _Look at me_.”

I look at him, and all I see is the monster he tried to bury reflected in his eyes.

“Killing is easy once you start, _until the day it isn’t."_

Burn hot. Then burn up. 

"This, what you're feeling - it's a choice. You don’t have to make the same mistakes I did.”

I already have, and I don't know how I can come back from this. I don't think I want to. I want to just _stop being._ I want –

“I want to go _home_.”

“Easy,” he says. “Just breathe.”

“My hands,” I choke out, staring at them clenched in the lapels of his jacket. “Why won’t they stop shaking?”

“It’s okay,” he murmurs, and I want to believe him, so much. “Just breathe.”

I breathe. I breathe as though every gulp of air I draw in is like the last I'll ever take.

* * *

I stay this way for far too long, collapsed against Daud, weeping and breathing until I’ve run out of tears and my heart no longer hammers in my chest as though trying to fracture my sternum. I become aware of myself, slowly – aware of the coarse, damp fabric under my cheek where my tears have stained Daud’s jacket. Aware of the smell of Dunwall’s grimy harbour, the smoke that clogs the air and the chill that has descended upon my once-beautiful city. Aware of the fact that Daud’s hands are on my shoulders and my fists are still clenched in his jacket, the fact that he is still murmuring soft encouragement, and the fact that the world hasn’t ended and the fire in my chest hasn’t consumed me alive and left behind nothing but ash.

If this is it what it feels like to burn up, I hope I never reignite again.

I take one last shuddering breath, gather my senses and wits and whatever is left of my pride, and push myself away from Daud. He watches me, silently, and waits.

“If you _ever_ ,” I warn, a waver in my tone, “bring this up again –”

“Bring what up.”

I fume, but then he offers me a small smile and inclines his head.

“I still haven’t forgiven you,” I mutter.

“I know.”

“I will _never_ forgive you.”

“I know.”

“I won’t forgive Meag— _Billie_ either.”

“There are worse things in this world than not being forgiven by you, Empress.”

My crimes were justified, and I know that I will never receive forgiveness for them, nor do I require it. Daud’s crimes were never justifiable to me, but now, I suppose, being an assassin was a legitimate career as any other in this Void-forsaken world. By the time this is over, both Daud and I will have an Empress’s life to our names.

He doesn’t need my forgiveness. And I don’t need to give it. He has my trust.

“If I can save Corvo, I’ll make him the Duke, but if not –” I break off, swallowing. “If not, I’ll form a Council under Stilton. There are… changes I need to make.”

Mistakes I need to fix. A legacy I need to honour, not tarnish. An Empire that deserves my attention, not my wrath.

There's just one small problem I need to take care of before I can be the Empress my mother would have wanted me to be. The Empress I should have been, all this time.

His eyebrows rise. “That’s – good,” he says, surprised.

I sneer as I push past him, heading towards the skiff, though it's halfhearted at best. “I don’t require your approval.”

“Emily. I’m proud of you.”

I try to think of a cold and biting way to tell him to take his pride and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine, but Delilah’s spirit that beats the heart that was my mother’s dully in my pocket feels like poison against my chest, reminding me of everything I’ve done and everything I’ve lost and everything I have yet to make up for, and I haven’t the strength to do anything other than wearily say, “Shut the fuck up, Daud.”

* * *

**makes you wonder why**

Delilah’s Dunwall is a graveyard.

I’ve seen this city go bad before. I’ve seen her drowning in floodwater, drenched in grease and slime and oil and blood, riddled with rats and choked with corruption. It took years to paint that over – to drain the swamps, to clear the streets of bodies, and even longer for the air to taste of something other than sickness and death. Delilah inherited a vibrant, flourishing city of iron and cobble, the pinnacle of civilisation in the Empire, but if it was so horrifically easy for her to destroy in a matter of months I wonder if all I ever did was cover up its flaws.

The sun is choked by a relentless sky of grey clouds; nothing new. What is new are the gouges in the buildings, the vines knotting the streets surrounding the Tower, the bodies of citizens and guards strewn across the cracked streets. Smoke rising from the remains of the government building like a beacon, warning all those who dare approach Dunwall to turn away. The smell of whale blood and steel carries on the saltwater air, and with it the scent of burnt flesh and poison.

This isn’t the heart of the Empire. This is a war zone.

“This way,” Daud grunts, re-sheathing his sword; before him, the rabid, half-starved hound releases its final breath. “Thomas says the resistance is holed up in the printing press. He sent word ahead – they’re expecting us.”

So close to the Tower – though I suppose it’s no surprise that Delilah has not been able to keep a grip on this city. How could she? Even during Dunwall’s darkest days during the plague, Burrows had his noble supporters while rats ate away at the city’s foundations. While my city drowned and decayed the privileged few kept on organising their cocktails, their parties, their masked balls – as long as the money was there and they didn’t have to worry about rot and weeds and filthy encroaching upon their mansions, they didn’t care who was in charge.

Delilah has no noble support. She has no silver coming in from the South to buy favours from those with wealth of their own; no army of Clockwork Soldiers to pick up in lieu of loyal guards and officers who can keep the rioting citizens in line. She doesn’t even have the Oracular Order spinning stories about her grandiosity any longer.

She might be the Empress but all that’s left is her and her witches, and no one will support an Empress who lets their city rot from the inside out. I learned that the hard way. Still, there’s a certain irony to the fact that Delilah’s mere existence was my own best propaganda. The people will be grateful for me to reclaim my throne, because the alternative is – well.

I don’t want to just be the alternative to Delilah. The lesser evil. I want to do Jessamine proud – once I finish what I started.

“We’ll have to make this quick,” I say, pushing open the doors of the Dunwall Courier offices. “The longer we’re here –”

“ _Emily?_ ”

I freeze.

That voice. That _voice –_

There’s a blur, a blue jacket and red hair, and I’m engulfed in an embrace. My mind is locked and I can’t think, I can’t speak, I can’t do anything except let muscle memory take over – my arms come around her body, remembering the curve of her waist and the tone of her muscle, the faint smell of gunpowder and steel –

“Oh, gods, Emily, you’re back, I wasn’t sure I’d ever –”

" _Alexi_ –"

"You're freezing cold. Someone get her a jacket, she's shivering –"

“I’m sorry,” I choke, clutching her tightly, “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m all right, Emily –”

“I left you behind.”

“Because I told you to.”

“I thought you were _dead –_ ”

“If not for Rinaldo, I would have been,” Alexi says, and reaches for my face to tuck a strand of hair that has escaped from its pins behind my ear. I never thought I’d feel that again.

Words fail me. My hands fist in the fabric of her jacket and tears streak down my cheeks, and she just holds me through it, and when she presses her mouth to mine, for one perfect moment where nothing else exists but her, I let myself that nothing is wrong at all.

* * *

Rinaldo was the one who found her, after I’d fled the Tower. He staunched the bleeding, carried her to safety, and nursed her back to health while she orchestrated a resistance from a recovery bed. The wound will scar; she may even be in pain for the rest of her life. But she’s alive, and strong, and healthy, and I take back every single bad word I ever said about Rinaldo.

I refuse to let Alexi out of my sight. Inside the office of the Dunwall Courier, Alexi stands by my side as we – myself, Daud, Rinaldo, Alexi and other high-ranking loyal officers of the resistance – pour over maps of the city and blueprints of the Tower. Dunwall has done what Dunwall does best; partition itself from the destruction, cutting off entire districts like a surgeon amputating gangrenous limbs. The worst destruction exists in the no-man’s land area the rest of the city and the Tower – this area. Outside of Delilah’s stranglehold, the city and citizens get on with their lives as best they can, kept in check by the resistance and the Overseers.

“Delilah’s reign is in disarray. She has no money, no army, and no propaganda campaign.” Alexi grins. “You tore down everything holding her up, Emily. All that’s left to reclaim is the Tower. She and her witches are holed up there like rats, but –”

Rinaldo interrupts. “We should have heard from the Overseers by now.”

“Where are they?” I ask.

“High Overseer Catherick launched an assault on the Tower several days ago,” Alexi says. “He spent months rallying the Overseers, culling those he didn’t trust, tuning the music boxes. We hoped to have seen the all-clear signal by now, but…” She chews her lower lip. “Nothing.”

I look over towards Daud, to gauge his reaction to this, but his expression remains stony and unreadable.

I sigh. “I’ll find out when I get to the Tower. If I take out Delilah, then her witches lose their power. When she’s down, I’ll signal the all-clear – you can lead your forces back in and reclaim the city.”

“You’re going in on your own?”

“No. Daud will come with me.”

Daud, in response, pushes himself away from the table and stalks over to the other side of the room.

Alexi glances towards him as well. “I still can’t believe he’s back,” she murmurs. “How –”

“It’s a long story,” I say, quiet. “I’ll explain afterwards.”

“Is he all right?”

I hesitate, just a little too long, and Rinaldo scowls heavily when I end up not replying at all.

“Come on,” I tell Alexi instead. “I need to stock up on supplies, and you need to gather the resistance.”

She halts me when we reach the inventory, temporarily escaping the crowd, her hand tight around my arm before I can reach for a casing of bullets and hardbolts.

“Something’s different about you,” she says, voice sharp.

I don't want to lie to her about what I am and what I've done, but I can't bear to imagine the look of disgust and horror on her face when I confess.

“…Yes,” I agree.

Alexi frowns. “You’ll talk to me, afterwards,” she says firmly, when it becomes clear I'm not going to answer just yet.

I’ll tell her everything. Every single little detail of my sordid actions, my crimes, the blood on my hands. “You might not like what you hear.”

“There’s nothing you’ve done or could ever do that would stop me from loving you.”

She says that, now. She doesn’t know. I don’t like myself very much right now. Even the last echo of my own mother couldn’t stand to be around me any longer.

“I haven’t finished what I need to do,” I say. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“Emily –”

I grasp her hands. “I thought you were dead,” I say, tears burning my eyes again. “I thought I’d lost you forever. I’m not afraid to say I love you anymore, remember that. But you might not love me after I do what I need to.”

Alexi gazes at me, long and hard. “You don’t get to make that decision for me, Emily. You didn’t then, and you don’t know.”

I’m not sure if it’s me or Alexi who moves first. Our mouths press together, hard and desperate, full of tension and aching desire, and it’s almost enough to convince me that I deserve her. Almost enough to stay right here in her arms, and forget everything I’ve done. To pretend, just for a little while, that I’m the person my mother wanted me to be; that I’m the person Corvo thought I was.

I pull away, breathing hard, and we rest our foreheads together. “I love you,” I tell her again.

“Keep safe," she orders. "Do whatever you need to do to win back your throne.”

I will.

* * *

It becomes clear enough, once we breach the walls of the Tower, as to why the Overseers hadn't given the all-clear signal.

There's something deeply, viscerally horrifying about stepping over tens of hundreds of bodies of the Overseers. The Abbey of the Everyman is not well-loved by the people; they are too militant, too aggressive, to have ever won affection. So they inspired fear instead, striking terror into the hearts of men by twisting human self-indulgences into vile acts of heresy, as though purity is something achieved by stopping people from shoving their hands down their own pants or losing their inhibitions outside of the Fugue. Often times, I found those most corrupt were those within the Abbey itself; self-righteous monsters who broke their own precious Strictures because they were somehow better or more enlightened, engaging in casual abuse of their power over the common folk, succumbing to the drink, taking advantage of the young boys inducted into their order.

But despite their vices, they are still an institution of immense power, worthy of respect. I have no particular love for the Abbey, but these men were my citizens and they died in my name. Under Jasper Catherick's guiding hand, the Overseers became an intellectual force to be reckoned with, and amongst my strongest allies in Dunwall during my ineffective. Jasper, who always had a smile for me, a clever retort on the tip of his tongue, and could twist the very Abbey to his will and needed little to no intervention from the throne. Jasper, whose first and only concern has been himself and his power, or so Corvo always claimed. Proud Jasper, who kept his uniform straight and ironed, who walked with his head held high and seemed almost untouchable.

Delilah's witches have strung him up to a post, right in the middle of my Tower.

At a distance, he looks dead. His uniform is shredded; blood seeps from every joint, dripping to a small puddle of blood beneath him where he is tied to the post like a scarecrow. They've clawed his face and thrown darts into his body as though he was a board for him to play with. And before him, the bodies of more Overseers, brutally tortured before his very eyes.

“He’s alive," Daud murmurs, pressing his fingers to Jasper's pulse. "Help me get him down.”

Together we cut Jasper down from the post. Daud's face is grim now, tense with fury, as we help Jasper to a corner out of sight of witches who may be passing by. Daud eases him against the wall, hand gripping his shoulder tightly.

“Jasper.”

Jasper groans, his eyes fluttering open. “Daud,” he mutters. “I’m – dreaming.”

Daud grimaces. “Unfortunately not.”

Jasper blinks, then blinks again, glancing between myself and Daud with unfocused, pain-ridden eyes. “Daud,” he says again, a question this time.

Daud is patient with him. “Yes.”

“I… we all thought you were dead,” Jasper whispers. “Three years. You – bastard. Where the hell have you been?”

Daud doesn’t need to look at me; I can feel the remnants of his anger emanating in my direction. “1849,” he says, tersely, “which was three weeks ago for me.”

“That definitely… sounds like something that’s violated the Strictures.”

“At least three,” I agree, managing to smile weakly.

“You're alive, Empress,” Jasper murmurs, blinking up at me through his bleary, bloodshot eyes. “Thank mercy.”

“I’ve come to end Delilah’s tyranny.”

“You’re… a little late. I started without you.”

“Yes,” I say wryly. “Good job.”

He grips my left hand, more tightly than I would have expected from a person who’s gone Void knows how long without food and water. “The music boxes,” he rasps. “They were useless against the witches. So many of my Brothers… we all fell to them. We were going to reclaim the palace for you, but…” He closes his eyes, and to my horror, I watch tears slip from the corners of his eyes. “It was a massacre.”

“Feodor?” Daud asks, voice sharp.

There’s a tense silence, then Jasper shakes his head.

Daud looks away.

“I’m sorry, Jasper,” I say. “But I’m here now. I _will_ stop Delilah.”

“Oh? Yes… I can… smell the heresy on you.” Jasper coughs again, red flecks of blood staining his lips even as he manages a small smile. “He mentioned… he had left his Mark on you.”

_What?_

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so hasty to decline his offer,” Catherick whispers. “But you… Good. Maybe it will… take a witch to defeat a witch.”

“I intend to do a lot more than just defeat her. Delilah _dies_ , tonight.”

“Emily,” Jasper says. “I heard the witches talking. Delilah has been – obsessed. Frantic. She intends to perform a ritual of some sort – she used the chapel to prepare for whatever it is. Look there. There might be something that can help you.”

If it means finding something that will kill her more quickly, then it might be worth the detour.

“Don’t die,” I order him, pressing a spare vial of S&J Health Elixir into Jasper’s hand. “I need you after I reclaim my throne. Will you be all right if I leave you here?”

“I’ve… survived worse,” Jasper says. “Go. Slay the bitch. Outsider speed your steps.”

Daud’s eyebrows rise. “You,” he says, “are by far the worst Overseer I’ve ever met.”

Jasper doesn’t laugh. “Daud, I –” he says, his hand catching in Daud’s sleeve, fingers curling in the rough fabric with an urgency I’ve never seen in him before. It makes him look vulnerable. Exposed. He knows it, too, and he breaks off, and the raw emotion on his face frozen.

Daud stays silent, his expression unreadable.

I used to wonder, before walking in on my father and Daud locking lips in a corridor, if Daud and the High Overseer were… intimate. Jasper was good at hiding his affection, but it would find ways to slip out – the way he would smile whenever in Daud’s presence, or seemed to know exactly where the man was at any given moment and anticipated his every need and query. Daud, for his part, was either oblivious or simply ignored all of this, playing it off as Jasper being competent and nigh-omnipotent with his spies in every corner and preferring instead to maintain the High Overseer as a… friend? A trusted acquaintance? Whatever Daud’s true feelings are for the man, he’s never let it appear to be anything deeper than a mutually beneficial business arrangement. When he disappeared three years ago, my father was shattered. Jasper –

Well. Like I said. Jasper was just better at hiding it.

He grimaces, letting his hand fall, and the Overseer’s mask returns as though it had never left. “…I’m… glad to see you again,” Jasper finishes, lamely.

Daud nods, grimly – and, to my surprise, or perhaps it’s not that much of a surprise at all, he removes his jacket and drapes it over Jasper’s frame. Jasper nods in gratitude, weakly, and closes his eyes.

“Let’s go,” Daud tells me, stepping back, and together we head towards the chapel.

There is a tree in my chapel that wasn’t there when I left.

It’s ancient; as though someone planted it beneath the tiles centuries ago and it has been growing ever since. The tiles are cracked and the gnarled tree extends its way up the wall and along the upper level, winding through the wall so deeply that I can’t even tell where it ends and the plaster begins.

In the middle of the room is a painting. One of Delilah’s works. A tree in the chapel.

She brought the damn thing to life.

“This is what she’s doing,” I say, flicking through her sketchbook. The last draft – an ink drawing of a Dunwall where Delilah’s statues line the streets and roses bloom. A city of white, with no ash, no pain, no suffering. A city where Delilah sits upon a throne before her loving citizens, and by her side – Jindosh, Ashworth and Abele.

_There is nothing you’ve done that I cannot fix_.

I feel sick. I can’t let this come to pass. I can’t let this false world come true.

“Delilah will die for what she did,” I tell him.

“So you’ve said. Numerous times.”

“I’d’ve thought you of all people would be happy about this.”

Silence.

“I can’t _afford_ a non-lethal approach with Delilah,” I say, urging him to understand, though he'd not refuted me. "You tried that last time, as I recall, and that didn't work out very well. Who's to say she won't escape again?"

“Will it be worth it, Emily?”

“I’ve come this far. I’ve done this much.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It has to be worth it. Otherwise everything I’ve done has been for nothing, and I –” I break off.

_You are becoming the monster he tried to bury._

“Just... come on,” I say.

“We need to turn on the power before we can get the lift working,” Daud points out.

I shake my head. “No,” I say. “That’ll alert every single witch in this palace. There’s another way up." I break off, and chew my lower lip. The next words I say are like a knife to my chest. "Through my mother’s secret room.”

Daud immediately steps backwards. “No,” he says, voice a low growl and his expression darkening.

I know why, of course. My mother's secret room behind the fireplace was my place. Mine and Corvo's. No one else but he and I knew about the room. No one else was allowed in there. After I'd learned of my father's relationship with Daud, I'd feared for one stricken moment between two ruptured heartbeats that Corvo brought him inside the room sacred to us both.

But he wouldn't. He didn't. Not even once. Corvo may have forgiven Daud and I may have accepted Daud's presence in our lives, but this was one place he has never, ever been allowed. Daud may know about it but he never set foot in it, refusing to desecrate it with his presence. I can't speak for his complicated relationship with my mother's memory; but I do know is that he has spent every single day since the day he killed her on Burrows' orders repenting for his crime. 

It won't bring Jessamine back. Nothing will. But I'm tired of being angry. I'm tired of waking up every morning to a simmering rage at a man who has done nothing but serve me and Corvo for more than ten years to honour and repay Jessamine. I'm tired of being _me_. The Emily Kaldwin of a mere few months ago would sooner have shot Daud than allowed him to enter her room, but Jessamine's memory is stronger than Daud's presence in the sanctuary.

If anyone is tarnishing her memory, between the two of us – well. It isn't Daud.

"Well?" I say, quietly. "Come on. I don't mind."

He stares at me with an expression I cannot read, and it's now that I notice his face, _really_ notice his face. The bone-deep weariness, the grim determination covering for something he won't let me see. He's searching my face, looking for something, and whatever that something is he finds it because after an eon he nods, tersely, and steps forwards.

* * *

**march down that road**

My mother’s secret room always smelled of her perfume, like sweet jasmine, and it was this smell that I associated the most with the Empire of the Isles until the age of ten when a whaling blade washed that away, replacing it when the scent of blood and steel. She once taught me that to successfully rule an Empire, four things are vital: happy and healthy people, a good economy, education, and trusted law enforcement.

While true, it was a simplistic sentiment. Her advisors and ministers always did criticise her for not preparing me more for the role I would end up assuming far too young. They wanted me to learn politics, nuance, how to play the game. Trade agreements, the art of negotiation, philosophy and science instead of stories of pirates and games of hide-and-seek. But my mother was an honourable woman and believed in the good of mankind and tried for too long to protect me from the harsh realities of the world in favour of attempting to maintain my childhood, which would end up being her downfall. Instead of lectures on trade and the economy, she would sing me to sleep. Instead of history lessons, she would read me stories about pirate ships and battles and other inappropriate tales. Instead of sitting in on parliament sessions with her, she would allow me to play outside with Corvo, hide-and-seek behind the bushes.

Nothing will ever stop me from loving Jessamine. Nothing will ever quell the empty ache in my chest where she will forever live on. Not even her last words to me. But she wasn’t perfect. Better than me, but still imperfect.

The ruling of an Empire is a delicate art and it requires far more than the careful balancing of those four elements. One mistake – one bad piece of legislation, one unhappy noble with too much power – and the best-case scenario would be that you’d have to deal with a deadlocked Parliament for a few months. Worst-case scenario, that unhappy noble would introduce a plague to the city to rid it of the underclasses and then hire an assassin to kill you before you could discover the truth.

The last thing I expected upon returning to the throne room which now smells of paint and blood and poison was to find the oil painting Anton carefully crafted of Jessamine still there, months after the day I laid a rose before it and watched my world shatter.

I expected Delilah to have burned it or thrown it out at sea, and honestly, I wish she had. Delilah desecrated it the way she has desecrated everything else I’ve ever held dear – she sliced a blade across Jessamine’s mouth and painted the word _LIAR_ across her chest, the same way she did on the memorial plaque on the pavilion. Instead, strangely she has allowed it to remain in the room where she weaves together her masterpiece with paint and magic of the Void, positioning it perfectly before her work so that she can mocking it; Delilah’s final victory over the half-sister that betrayed her as a child.

I was disappointed when I first saw the portrait at its unveiling for the anniversary; though Anton captured Jessamine’s regal refinement, her pose, I thought her detached, impersonal, as though she was being seen from afar. I realise now I was wrong. Anton was one of her closest confidants when she lived; he knew her as an adult and Empress where I’d only ever known her as my mother. He didn’t make Jessamine cold and impersonal as though he’d never met her before.

He painted her to judge me.

She’s watching me, now. Watching as I return Delilah’s soul to her; watching her Heart crumble to ash and dust in my hands when it fades away forever. Watching as I bend the power of the Void to my will and drive Delilah to her feet before her masterpiece, a perfect Empire of white marble adorned by Delilah’s statues across the city, all the world bowing before her. Is this how Daud felt, living in that submerged, rotting Chamber of Commerce, staring up every single day at the stone statue of my mother, having to bear the weight of the cold judgement in her unseeing eyes?

One more life. This shouldn’t matter. I’ve killed enough already. I can’t make the same claim to an ocean of blood that Daud can, but surely I’m close enough. What difference will an Empress, even a false one, make? I know how this game works. Another noble steps in to replace the last one, and their level of corruption is as fickle as the toss of a coin.

I should hate Delilah. I _did_ hate her. Where my mother was selfless and gentle and kind in the face of tragedy and died in an effort to save every single one of her citizens from the plague ravaging the city, Delilah is the antithesis: selfish, consumed by the pain of her childhood and unable to let go and move on to be satisfied with her own power and achievements and loved ones, arrogant, a killer with little regard for the lives she claimed.

Daud was right. Delilah could have possessed me at the age of ten, and no one in the Empire would ever have known the difference. 

I can’t hate Delilah, not anymore, because when I look at her I see a version of myself in another life, another universe. But that doesn’t change my mission. She might be the daughter of an Emperor but she bleeds red like any other creature when they die gracelessly. Some of my victims defecated themselves when they died. Others cried and begged for mercy. I felt nothing, regretted nothing, until I did. Why should Delilah’s life mean more than the others?

“No!” Delilah howls. “I’ve come too far – you _wretched child_ –”

“I warned you I would come for you,” I say, but the words sound as hollow as I feel. “I told you I would take _everything_ from you.”

I press Daud’s pistol to her heart.

“Take one final look at your fantasy world, Delilah.”

I squeeze the trigger, and now –

Now I finally know what it feels like to kill an Empress.

* * *

I make my way over to my father’s statue where I sit, and wait, and hug my knees. In the distance I hear the all-clear signal blaring out across the city; Alexi’s voice ringing out that the usurper and false Empress Delilah Copperspoon is dead. Long Live Emily Kaldwin, Rightful Empress of the Isles. A marble slab is better than no company at all.

I say nothing as Daud arrives. He says nothing, either. He approaches the marble and aborts an attempt to reach for Corvo. His hands falter before he can grasp Corvo’s stone shoulder, the expression on his face a mask barely concealing what we’re both feeling.

“I thought…” I whisper, my voice hoarse from crying. “I mean… some part of me hoped that when Delilah died, Corvo would…”

Daud closes his eyes.

“Maybe it’s better this way,” I say. “At least like this he doesn’t have to know about… everything that’s happened.”

Maybe it’s better that he doesn’t know I was responsible for Daud’s disappearance; maybe it’s better he doesn’t know what Delilah put Daud through. Maybe It’s better that he doesn’t have to wake up to find Dunwall in ruins and I won’t have to see his heart break at the knowledge that I became the monster Daud tried to bury.

Instead I’ll have to see him forever cast in cold marble, frozen with his arms outstretched and an expression of agony upon his face, in a last desperate attempt to protect me.

I choke; Daud’s hand grips my shoulder tightly, grounding me.

“I’m sorry, father,” I whisper, and finally I gather enough courage to reach for his face, brushing my fingers across the cold marble. “I love you.”

As I say this, the Mark on the back of my left hand begins to scald. I hiss at the brand sears my flesh like hot iron, as painfully at the day I received it, and the Outsider’s voice whispers _something_ , echoing and bleeding into the world as he reclaims his authority over the Void and purges Delilah’s presence from its vast endless expanse. Daud’s hand – his left hand – tightens on my shoulder and he hisses as well, then catches his breath when beneath my touch the stone begins to crack, dust issuing forth from where the marble crumbles and falls, breaking around Corvo who gasps for air and starts to fall to his knees.

“ _Corvo_ ,” I choke, using my weight to shoulder his fall. Daud, behind me, steps backwards, his hand leaving my shoulder while Corvo stands, barely, surrounded by the rubble that encased him for months on end and in my arms I can feel his shaking and coughing, his hands finding the fabric of my jacket and clenching tightly.

“Emily, wh…” Corvo coughs, squinting blearily at me. “What happened?”

“You’re alive,” I whispers, tears tracking down the dust clinging to my cheek. “Corvo – _father_ –”

Corvo coughs again, glancing around. “Delilah. She –”

“It’s over,” I say. “I’ll explain everything soon. I thought you were dead. I thought she killed you.”

“I’m fine, Emily,” Corvo says. “I’m fine. I –”

Corvo tries to say something else, but whatever it is gets swallowed by the force of my embrace. He grunts, then winds his arms around my body, holding me tightly, the way he did when I was ten years old and the assassin Daud brought me back to his half-drowned base in the Chamber of Commerce, and I’d thrown myself into my Royal Protector’s arms. He was weak then, recovering from the poison; he feels the same way now, only just managing to keep himself upright and holding back with all the force he can muster. The first time during that entire ordeal I felt – _safe_. Like I didn’t have to be the daughter of a murdered Empress, the future ruler of a rotting world. I felt like I could just be Emily Kaldwin, a scared child, safe in her father’s arms.

I could stay this way forever.

It isn’t quite forever when Corvo stills in my embrace, his muscles stiffening when he sees Daud behind me.

Daud speaks first. "Corvo.”

“I – you –”

I move away, helping Corvo stand. When he does, he staggers, and Daud reaches for him to steady him.

“Easy,” Daud mutters.

Corvo shakes his head. “ _Easy_ ,” he repeats. “You – _three years_ –”

The line of Daud’s grim mouth thins; he says nothing, just holds Corvo while Corvo’s fists tighten in the fabric of his shirt, yanking him a little.

“You’ve been alive all this time – you let me _think_ –”

“It was my fault, father,” I say, quietly.

Corvo blinks, blearily shaking his head, but he doesn’t let go of Daud. “What?”

“It’s only been a few weeks for him,” I say. “Like he promised. I’ll – explain afterwards. It’s complicated.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We’ll explain later,” Daud mutters, his face the colour of ash.

Corvo struggles with himself, emotions filtering across his face faster than I can identify them, until he settles on something resembling confused agreement. Then furious relief. He sags against Daud, who holds him steady, and yanks his shirt again.

“I’m sorry,” Corvo says hoarsely.

Daud frowns. “That was supposed to be my line,” he replies. “What for?”

“Everything I said three years ago. I never told you I was sorry. I thought –”

Daud releases a strange noise; I realise a moment too late it’s an attempt at a laugh. “Shut the fuck up, bodyguard,” he says, voice strangled, and presses his forehead to Corvo’s. Corvo exhales, a deep, shuddering sigh and closes his eyes, and they stand there together in each other’s hold, silent except for their ragged breathing.

There’s much to say. There’s too much that’s happened to even know where to begin. Dunwall needs to be healed and restructured after Delilah’s destruction, and somehow soon I’ll have to tell Corvo I’ll be sending him back to the land of his birth so that he can heal it from my touch.

But that can call come later. For now, I let them have this.

* * *

**postscript**

_(‘fore the sunrise)_

“I’m going to miss you.”

“I know.”

“You know you can write to me any time –”

“Father.”

“– for any reason –”

“Corvo.”

“– and I’ll come straight back to Dunwall, all right?”

“ _Duke Attano_.”

Corvo falls silent, but there’s a hint of a smile there on his mouth. He rubs his beard, frowning slightly to himself even as he shakes his head and sighs. “Sorry.”

I grasp his hand tightly. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

Saying that won’t stop him from worrying, of course. I’m don’t exactly blame him either. He squeezes my hand back, smiling sadly. “I know,” he says, “but I will anyway. It’s my job.”

“As the Duke of Serkonos?”

“As your father. Alexi can heft the bulk of the worry though, now that she has my old job.”

Poor Alexi. But I think she secretly enjoys it.

I was… so sure she would hate me. Corvo, too, after I told them everything that happened. Everything I’d done. I was so sure I would see their eyes turn hard, disgust in their expressions. So sure I would hear them echo my mother’s words.

As if Corvo knows exactly what I’m thinking, he squeezes my hand again, urging me to look up and meeting his eyes. “I’m proud of you, Emily,” he says. “I know Jessamine would be, too.”

_My daughter… you are becoming the monster he tried to bury_.

I bite my lower lip, quelling the rise of tears. I want to believe him. But I know the truth now.

There’s a quiet knock on the door and both of us turn to see Billie entering.

Meagan Foster. Billie Lurk. Liar and assassin and witch, complicit in my mother’s death. And my new Spymaster.

“The ship is ready to set sail,” Billie tells us. “Just waiting on you, Lord Attano.”

“Daud’s on board?”

“Not yet. He’s waiting at the docks for you both.”

“Thank you, Billie,” I say, and she dismisses herself.

“Serkonos will do us both good, I think,” Corvo says.

“He can start that vineyard he wanted.”

My father cracks a small, but sad, smile. “Heh. Yeah.”

Daud is waiting for us at the docks. I expected Jasper to be here, too, to say his own farewells, but the Abbey of the Everyman doesn't rebuild itself; presumably he said his goodbyes in private. Daud waits silently while I bid my final goodbye to Corvo, hugging him tightly as though this is the last time I’ll ever see him. Then when we’re done, Daud steps forward, and holds out his hand to me.

I grasp it tightly.

“Empress,” Daud murmurs.

“At least you’re saying goodbye this time,” I say, the quiver in my voice betraying me.

“It’s not forever. If you ever need anything, for any reason –”

“I know,” I say. “Thank you.”

He releases my hand with every intention of turning to board, but before he does, I move forward and hug him.

Daud starts; so does Corvo, watching us from the side. Daud stiffens in my hold, then eventually relaxes, just a little, and he returns the embrace. "You'll be all right, Emily," he whispers.

I will be. Eventually. I hope he will be, too.

Daud releases me and tilts his head towards me. "Empress," he murmurs again, bowing his head, and turns to board the ship. 

I sit and watch the boat leave, until it vanishes over the horizon and the sun has almost followed it.

* * *

“Worried about the old man?” Billie asks as we make our way back to the Tower.

“He looks like a walking corpse,” I say. “A bit of sunlight will do him some good. Get some colour in him.”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re quite charming, Your Imperial Majesty?” Billie drawls.

I smile back, wryly. “On occasion.”

Billie snorts. “Your address begins in ten minutes.”

Ah yes, to my new parliament made up of ancient un-retirees and young boys and girls barely out of their schooling while the ministerial building is rebuilt. I can hardly wait. Billie bows her head and slips away as silently as the night to reconvene with Thomas elsewhere, leaving me outside the doors to the Tower with my retinue of loyal guards, all hand-picked by Alexi.

“Ready?” Alexi says when she joins my side, straightening my jacket.

I breathe. “Ready,” I say.

“Just one last touch.” Alexi pulls out my signet ring from her pocket and takes my hand, sliding the ring on to my finger. “There. All set.”

I kiss her, and I don’t care who sees. “Let’s go rule an empire.”

It'll take time. It'll take patience, which I'm not always good at having. And it'll be one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, but the cracks are already starting to mend, the Overseers slowly starting to heal, and the city starting to wash away the blood and ash and pain of Delilah's reign and my previous neglect.

Dunwall will be all right, and I will do right by Jessamine.

And this time, I wrote the speech.

**the end**

**Author's Note:**

> I am no longer active in the _Dishonored_ fandom, but if you liked my writing, come follow me on [Tumblr](http://hlmoorewrites.tumblr.com/deathsembrace) \- I have two books out!


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